Do you remember a few years ago when Web Watch showed you a REAL-WORLD COMPARISON OF GERM SIZES?
You were able to zoom in from the size of a sheet of paper down to the size of a carbon atom. Along the way, you could see and compare the sizes of different germs when compared to common, everyday objects.
Yeah, not too shabby, and kinda cool.
But what if we wanted to take the same concept, and compare the sizes of pretty much everything in the entire universe to, well, the entire universe?
That’s what the SCALE OF THE UNIVERSE is trying to do.
It takes you from the world of things so small that “actual measured size is more of a guess at this point” all the way to the enormity of the entire universe.
Do you know what a yoctometer is? Let’s put it this way: if the estimated size of the entire universe is calculated out to be 1027, a yoctometer is so small, that just .0000000001 yoctometer is larger than 10-35. (Yeah, Web Watch isn’t too sure about the math on that, but that’s a lot of zeros and a lot of decimal places. Trust us, it’s a pretty wide range to play with.)
Along the way, each object on the scale can be clicked on, so you can learn interesting facts about each one, such as:
- Vatican City may only consist of 800 meters of space, but if you were to stretch out your entire body’s flesh so that it spread evenly across that entire area, the overall thickness would be about 200 nanometers thick.
- Rhode Island may be the smallest US state, but it could still contain the entire world’s population within its borders.
- A human egg cell description contains the word “ovoviviparous”. Why is that word special? It’s the only word in the English language that has the starting pattern of “V – vowel – V – vowel – V – vowel”.
Go take a look at the size of the universe, and see what other interesting facts you can uncover.