Transcript Large Numbers in Space - Centennial Middle School

Large Numbers in
Space
(Its Mind Blowing!)
The Whirlpool Galaxy – the
darling of astronomy
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per SECOND!
1 light year = 5.88 trillion miles!
The Whirlpool Galaxy is 31 MILLION light years away
That’s 182,237,386,568,691.84 miles!
There are 300,000,000,000 stars in the Whirlpool Galaxy!
It is only one of hundreds of millions of known galaxies!
Our sun
The sun is 93 million miles away from Earth.
It takes sunlight approximately 8 minutes to reach Earth traveling at 186,000 miles per
second!
If the Earth was a ping pong ball, the sun would be 15 feet in diameter!
960,000 Earths could fit inside of the sun.
That’s enough ping pong balls to fill a school bus!
Betelgeuse – the brightest star that
we can see from Earth.
Betelgeuse is 427 light years away from Earth = 2,510,173,034,349,400.5 miles!
It is 2 times the size of Earth’s ORBIT!
If the Earth were a ping pong ball, Betelgeuse would have a
diameter equal to 6 Empire State Buildings stacked one on
top of another.
262 trillion Earths would fit inside Betelgeuse.
That’s enough ping pong balls to fill the Atlanta Superdome
. . . . . . 3,000 times.
Mu Cephei Star
Mu Cephei is 3,000 light years away from Earth! 17,635,876,119,550,824 miles!
If the Earth was a ping pong ball, Mu Cephei would have a diameter equal to the
width of two Golden Gate Bridges!
2.7 quadrillion Earths would fit inside of Mu Cephei!
Quadrillion?
1 million seconds is 12 days ago.
1 billion seconds ago would put you back in 1981!
1 trillion seconds ago would put you back in 29,694 B.C.!
1 quadrillion seconds ago = 30,800,000 years ago!
Canis Majoris – the largest known
star
Canis Majoris (The Greater Dog) is 3200 light years from Earth! That’s
18,811,601,194,187,544 miles.
If the Earth was a ping pong ball, Canis Majoris would have a diameter equal to
the height of Mount Everest from sea level (approx. 6 miles)!
7 quadrillion Earths would fit inside Canis Majoris!
That’s enough ping pong balls to cover
the state of Texas . . . . . . 22 inches deep!
Other large numbers:
• If you counted each star in our Milky Way Galaxy at the rate of one per
second, it would take you 2,500 years to count them all!
• It would take 96 years to read one person’s DNA description of 3 billion
characters at the rate of one character per second.
•75 trillion cells make up one human body.
• Sight begins when one million optic cells from the nerve center meet with
one million cells from the eye.
• Size