Giant Objects in Space One of the things I think most of us don’t give much thought to is how huge some of the objects in space are. Some are so large many of us can’t wrap our brains around the size. Take our sun for example. It is considered to be average size with some being a lot larger and some being a lot smaller. It makes up over 99.8 percent of our solar system. Here is an astounding statistic concerning it and the earth. You could fit almost a million earths into it, and if there was no space and they were pushed together you could get 1.3 million in. Remember it is only averaged sized. There is a star which is far bigger. It is the biggest star we have found. Its name is UY Scuti, and it has a diameter 1,700 times larger than our star. Our sun has a diameter of 864,000 miles which means the diameter of UY Scuti is about 1,468,800,000 miles. It is hard to imagine something that large. For comparison the smallest star is OGLE-TR-122-b. It has a radius of 0.12 of that of the sun. There are said to be far smaller stars but this is said to be the only small star which was accurately measured. One neutron star is suspected of having a diameter of about 1 mile. Filaments exist in space and recently it was found they can connect galaxies. It has been discovered these filaments are the largest structures in space we have found. A parsec is about 19.17 trillion miles. I am telling you this for reference so you can realize how big a filament is. The typical one is 50 to 80 megaparsecs long. One parsec is 3.26 light years. While we think filaments are the largest structures, we could be wrong. There are a lot of theories which include multiverses. There is the possibility there could be bubbles containing many universes which might make these bubbles the biggest objects in space. There could even be something bigger containing the bubbles. We just don’t know enough about these structures. If we consider distance and space, distance is huge. We are used to living on the planet earth. In space the distance between things is so vast our current technology takes years just to reach some of the planets in our own solar system. If we are talking about traveling to our nearest solar system it would take about 100 years. This is one of the reasons why we are looking for ways to travel far faster than we can travel today. Black holes can also be so large it is hard for us to imagine their size. There is much talk about their diameters but for all we know this could be the result of some type of unknown object which is far smaller but with incredible gravity creating a much larger area when light can not escape. The black hole M87 is found in the constellation Virgo. It is hard to believe but it has a diameter of about 23.6 billion miles. Can anyone even imagine a figure like this? The diameter of M87 is greater than the distance from the sun to the Pluto planet. This is about 2.27 billion miles. Distances in space are so incredible we had better succeed in increasing the speed of our spacecraft or we will be trapped here with the solar system becoming the limit of our ability to travel. I have talked before about the alternate methods of travel which have been and are being considered, but I believe it will take new science advancements before we can really gain the ability for any meaningful increase in that speed. Einstein said we could never reach light speed, but even light speed is far too slow, it would still take years to reach our closest neighboring solar system in Alpha Centauri. When we talk about the asteroid belt we are talking about an asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter. For years it was believed a planet existed there but then exploded. Today most scientists think there is not enough debris for that planet to have existed. In the field are a few of what we could call giant asteroids or planetoids, which are sometimes called dwarf planets. They are the giants of the field and it is said they might even support life and should be checked out. Ceres is one of those dwarf planets. It was discovered in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi. Ceres has 25 percent of the entire mass of the asteroid belt. Ceres has a radius of 1/13th that of earth which is 296 miles. Remember that is the radius not the diameter. It is believed it was formed at roughly the same time as the earth. Another giant object in space is a galaxy cluster. Our galaxy the Milky Way is part of what is known as the Local Group. It is a cluster of galaxies which contain the Milky Way, Andromeda , Triangulum and Large Magellanic Cloud and others. There are about 30 galaxies in the Local Group. This is far from the biggest group. There are super clusters of galaxies which would dwarf our own group. Galaxies are huge, clusters of galaxies are even bigger and super clusters the biggest. In our solar system the largest planet is Jupiter. It is a gas giant and has a diameter about 11 times that of earth at 88,846 miles. It also has the largest moon in the solar system which is Ganymede which is 3,273 miles in diameter. The diameter of our moon is 2,158 miles. While Jupiter is a giant planet it is not the biggest. So far, the biggest planet found is HAT-P-67 b. It is also a gas giant. Its diameter is 2.08 times that of Jupiter or about 184,800 miles. How would you like to travel across that planet if it were possible? We are really not capable of measuring moons on other planets outside the solar system yet, so we could someday conceivably find moons as big as the earth or maybe bigger. There still can be plenty of undiscovered objects and things for a lack of a better word in space we have yet to discover and some of them could be very large. When and if we discover our first wormhole it might surprise us by its size. Does space exist inside a huge organism? Some people in the past thought this might be possible. Can you imagine how big it would have to be? I bet you can’t.
|
