If the Milky Way were the size of a penny, how big would the rest of the universe be?

A penny is about 1 inch across. If this equals 100,000 light years as the diameter of the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy is about 23 inches away, the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies is about 60 million light years or 600 inches away, and the nearest quasar, 3C273 is about 1.5 billion light years or 150,000 inches or a bit over 2 miles away. The visible universe has a horizon at about 15 billion light years and the most distant galaxies seen by the Hubble Space Telescope are nearly at this limit at about 12-13 billion light years. This is about 15 - 20 miles away from the Milky Way 'penny' and is the farthest we can ever see. If the universe is infinite, then of course there is much more space even at the scale of our penny! If the universe is finite, then the limit to space today, curved around like the great circle on a sphere, is probably about 70 billion light years or so.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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