A walk through the Universe

Space is big. You just wont believe

how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly
big it is. I mean, you may think its
a long way down the road to the
chemists, but that's just peanuts
to space.
Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
English humorist & science fiction novelist
(1952 - 2001)
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The Earth We are
here

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4
 Venus

Mercury

Mars

EARTH
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Jupiter Uranus
Neptune

Earth
Pluto
(not a planet)
and its moon
Charon

Saturn
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The Sun

is our nearest star

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The Solar
System
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The Milky Way (Our Galaxy)

A hundred, thousand, million stars! 10

 the Milky Way
as seen from
the Enterprise

Light would take

100 000 years to
travel across
the galaxy.
A hundred thousand light years across
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Distances
It takes 8 minutes for light to reach us
from the Sun.
A light-year is the distance travelled by
light in 1 year.

The Sun is our nearest star.

Our next nearest star, Alpha Centauri is
4 light years away.

The Milky Way is 100 000 light years

across.
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The local group of galaxies
Andromeda is
the nearest big
galaxy to the
Milky Way

Milky
Way
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Light from Andromeda takes
2 million years to reach us.
Milky
Way

Andromeda

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 The Local Supercluster
Here the local group has shrunk to the size of the
Milky Way in the last slide.

Local
group 15
Light from Virgo has taken 65 million
years to reach us. It left when the dinosaurs
were on Earth.

Virgo
Cluster

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The Universe is mind-bogglingly big!
The Sun is about 150 000 000 km away
from Earth

Bright stars in the night sky are about

1000 000 (1 million) times as far away
as the Sun.

The near galaxies are about 100 000

times as far away as the bright stars.
15 000 000 000 000 000 000 km
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NASA
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