The scale of the universe
Most maps of the universe cheat on scale, because honest scale is mostly empty space. This one does not: every distance below is real, and you can travel the whole ladder in one continuous zoom without the view ever cutting or jumping.
That is the point of it. The gap between the planets is genuinely vast; the gap between the stars is vastly larger again; and the gap between the galaxies dwarfs both. Reading the numbers is one thing, but flying the distance makes it land.
Every rung of the ladder, to scale
- Earth to the Moon — 384,400 km
- About 1.3 light-seconds — the only distance here humans have crossed.
- Earth to the Sun — 149.6 million km — 1 AU
- Light takes 8 minutes 20 seconds. This is the ruler everything else in the solar system is measured with.
- Earth to Mars, at closest — about 0.5 AU
- Even at its nearest, Mars is roughly 200 times further than the Moon.
- The Sun to Jupiter — about 5.2 AU
- Sunlight takes 43 minutes to get here, and it is already 5 times fainter than at Earth.
- The Sun to Neptune — about 30 AU
- The edge of the planets. A radio command takes over 4 hours each way.
- The Sun to Eris, at its furthest — about 98 AU
- The scattered disc: still bound to the Sun, but three times further out than Neptune.
- Voyager 1 — over 160 AU and climbing
- The most distant human-made object, now in interstellar space.
- The Sun to the nearest stars — about 4.2 light-years
- Roughly 270,000 AU. The entire solar system above would fit in a rounding error of this gap.
- The Sun to the galactic centre — about 26,700 light-years
- Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, sits at the middle of it.
- Across the Milky Way — about 100,000 light-years
- Our galaxy holds a few hundred billion stars, and light needs a thousand centuries to cross it.
- The Milky Way to Andromeda — 2.5 million light-years
- The nearest major galaxy, and the most distant object visible to the naked eye. It is falling toward us.
- Out to the Virgo Cluster — about 54 million light-years
- The heart of our local supercluster — over a thousand galaxies bound together.
Open the interactive 3D map of the universe and fly it yourself.