Not a problem.

No, but it's amazing nonetheless.

If Earth were the size of a tennis ball, the Sun would be a sphere about 22 feet in diameter, and Antares would be a really big ball, about 3 statute miles in diameter.

Here is a great site to show 'size'.

How various stars size up next to each other - even little old Earth

This is a great site to show - just how 'we' size up next to our SUN (SOL) and to other giants, super giants and hyper-giants.

EDITED:
I thought some of you might enjoy this "little" bit of inforamtion as well:

How Many Known Galaxies are there in the Universe?

The answer: 100,00 and counting!! There is extimated to 100 BILLION galaxies. That is a lot of "space"!

How Many Galaxies are there?

According to Wikipedia, the largest known star is VY Canis Majoris, here's a size comparison: Click, (the image is too large to display here).

Thanks for posting this. I've saved those pictures in a file, when I should've bookmarked the URL, and wanted to upload them onto this site to show perspective...but, I live in the boonies and the only connection available is dial up. It's excruciatingly slow...

Everyone should have a set of these pics to look at. Helps keep things in perspective. Absolutely mind boggling

If you guys really think Antares is the biggest, check this vid, it shows 2 stars even bigger than antares:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvNhw888XmM...3F&index=40

Talk about global warming

Good Thread, very informative, how insignificant are we?

Meh...I've seen bigger

now to imagine that antares is our mother star. haha

They kinda knock it into a cocked hat the idea that we are something special in the universe doesn't it ??



fullywired

When Antares dies what will it become? A neutron star? A black hole? I think certain kinds of suns have different fates at thier end. Imagine the black hole created by a sun like Antares.


Voyage through the Universe

A huge star like Antares will end it's life as a supernova. For a short period of time it will outshine the rest of the galaxy, releasing more energy than 100 billion stars. What remains afterwards will be a neutron star or, more likely a blackhole.




Ironically the black hole will not be anywhere near as big as you might imagine. When a supernova occurs the explosion is not right at the centre of the star but in a layer above the core. Most of the explosive power is forced out wards destroying the star and returning most of its mass to the universe in the form of gas. A new nebula is formed. This is how the heavier elements come into being. Every carbon atom in our bodies was once part of a star.

However because the explosion occurs around the core, not in it, some of the force of the explosion moves inwards. This puts the core under unbelievably high pressures and causes it to become super dense. Thus a neutron star or a black hole is formed. As only the core is compressed the black hole will have far less mass than the progenitor star.

Thanks for that Waspie Dwarf.

Meteor on Tape

May I contribute with a video of this very same topic?





I certainly will.

Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXOIdu8bHuo...feature=related

Well here is another one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfs1t-2rrOM...feature=related


Enjoy.

It all makes up, with thousands more, the Milky Way. And the Milky way is one galaxy, upon thousands, in the known Universe.

i love these type of posts, brilliant,

the sun could eat us with out knowing if it came near !

REB:

We are like microbes running around on the grander scale.
Hell, in comparison to the Earth itself, we are microbes...


Relative to the scales presented, we're merely atomic particles.
Relative to the known universe, we're nothing at all....less than sub-atomic.


...save in the aspect that we somehow, in our sub-atomic particle sized human brains, have been able to contemplate and understand to a degree, the immense infinite vastness we actually live in!

Well, good things come in small packages!

Well if there were indeed giant rock planets orbiting those suns, then the gravity would be so intent I don't think mobile life would be possible...Maybe underwater creatures, but I'm not sure how the properties of water-life would change in intense gravity.

Indeed they do, Lil!

Size was they say that Jupiter is about as big as a planet can get. They can be more massive but not much bigger. If they get any bigger they become a star.


This would mean that brown stars are not that much bigger than jupiter is.

IMO, in a nutshell, we've discovered & basically know ***SNIP*** of what's out there.

No body is saying that we do. I should have stated a gas planet not a rock planet. I think a rock planet the size of jupiter would be a black hole or a black dwarf.

XO-3b, found by American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii, has 12 to 13 Jupiter masses. The planet is an "odd" case due the combination of two major factors:

1. It's size.

2. It's proximity to it's star.

3. An elliptical orbit, and not round as expected.

There is a debate to consider XO-3b a brown dwarf or not. Which are massive objects that are smaller than stars. But there's still a lively debate among astronomers about how to classify brown dwarfs, here in SA, and wordwide. Some people believe anything capable of fusing deuterium, which in theory happens around 13 Jupiter masses, is a brown dwarf. Others say it's not the mass that matters, but whether the body forms on its own or as part of a planetary system.

I didn't say it couldn't get more massive. I said larger ie in size. Jupiter fuzes hydrogen don't know if it does deuterium or not.

Astronomers find universe's dimmest known galaxy


20:25 18 September 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Rachel Courtland




Astronomers have identified what appears to be the dimmest galaxy in the universe. Although it shines with the brightness of only a few hundred Suns, it seems to be full of dark matter, making it an ideal candidate to search for evidence of the mysterious material, they say.

The galaxy, known as Segue 1, is one of roughly two dozen dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. It sits close to the Sagittarius stream, a river of stellar debris torn from another dwarf galaxy.

So far, only 24 stars are confirmed members of Segue 1. Because it is so dim, astronomers originally thought it was a tight-knit group of stars called a globular cluster.

But follow-up observations by Marla Geha of Yale University and colleagues suggest it is indeed a dwarf galaxy. They measured the velocity of its stars and found they were all moving at roughly 5 kilometres per second, 10 times faster than expected if they were gravitationally bound only by each other.

The stars must be surrounded by a lot of matter to prevent them from flying off at such speeds. Although the total brightness of the galaxy adds up to less that 350 times the brightness of the Sun, it must weigh at least 450,000 Suns - and possibly 20 times that amount if it is as large as other dwarf galaxies.

NewScienceSpace

I think like Mid and Lilly on these points of prespective.We are luckie to be here and be aware of what and where we are in this universe. ITs all about size right? Man`s brain cant seem to get around the fact that even a sub-atomic sized universe could very well be in each and ever one of us Then we are all Universial in existance. Size is only important to those whom have a fear of the unknown. I revel in the fact that we are where we are ,Now to get out there and explore and repair this mess we made here.

AGREED!
I did learn something else from this topic... Betelgeuse is an arm pit!

lol! You know i was going to change/edit that Mid but yes, spot on.

Just shows ya i'm not too scientific...
(I blame that girl in science class always sitting in front of me...what a distraction!)

I have been asking that question over in the religion forums. Is the next dimension just size. Every time we think we have found the smallest thing we soon find something smaller so what makes us think that we have found the largest thing.

We keep discovering smaller and smaller things. We all know there has to be waaaay smaller than even we can imagine. Imagine this, a huge flare up from our sun could wipe us all out and we wouldn't even know what hit us.
Now imagine this, you have an itch on the back of your hand and you scratch it. You just wiped out an entire small sub-microscopic solar system that was living on the back of your hand.
Who's to say that what we perceive as these large 'super suns' aren't in all reality something sub-microscopic to something so immensely huge out there that we just can't fathom the though. One day this huge being decides to scratch the back of it's hand and 'poof' we are gone.

From his/her/it's point of view.

Oh I think these large massive super suns are in fact most definitely something sub-microscopic relative to something so immensely huge we just can't fathom it.

It's called the known universe, which is in fact so immensely huge that for many, perhaps most people, is something incomprehensible.

Let's not forget that the known universe is only part of the unknown universe. Which may be a living cell.

"Space is big,Really big,You just wont believe how vastly,hugly,mind-boggingly big it is.I mean,you may think its a long way down the street to the chemist,but thats just peanuts to space" From the Hitchhikers Guide ,Douglas Adams 1952-2001 We all need to read this book. But Space is just that. Space to expand into by Man and anything eles thats wants a great Exisistance.

They just found a planet that makes my point for me about gas planet size max.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26633


COROT has discovered a massive planet-sized object orbiting its parent star closely, unlike anything ever spotted before. It is so exotic, that scientists are unsure as to whether this oddity is actually a planet or a failed star.

The object, named COROT-exo-3b, is about the size of Jupiter, but packs more than 20 times the mass. It takes only 4 days and 6 hours to orbit its parent star, which is slightly larger than the Sun.