NASA visualization shows insane scale of space

INTRO Getting a sense of scale can be a funny thing when it comes to understanding just how vast our universe really is. On paper, sure, we can do the math. But human brains just aren't wired to fully comprehend the orders of magnitude to go from a hundred to a thousand to millions, billions and trillions of times greater than measures we understand. Take seconds, for example. Ten seconds? No problem. You can count that on your hands. Even a hundred seconds is pretty easy.

It's less than two minutes, and you can count that in your head. A thousand seconds? A little harder, just under seventeen minutes. Then a million seconds? That's just under twelve days, or about twice as long as Anthony Scaramucci was the White House Communications Director. A billion seconds, though? That's approximately thirty-one years, eight months, and nineteen days. More than the entire time, Shailene Woodley of Divergent and Big Little Lies fame has been on the planet. In a trillion seconds? That's more than six times all of recorded human history. So wait, what does any of this have to do with space? Well, when we're talking about things that are trillions of miles away, and billions of times the size of Earth, at a certain point the numbers alone start to lose meaning without some kind of visual comparison.

Although doing that is easier said than done. Even in our own solar system, scale is difficult to visualize. You can either look at the distance between planets in the sun, or their relative sizes. You can't really do both at the same time without losing something. But this week, NASA's Godard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab came out with a video that attempts to show just how ginormous something like a supermassive black hole really is. Starting with the sun, then pulling back to show the relative size of known black holes. From the relatively small, to the one at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, then growing larger and larger until landing on the largest black hole ever discovered, ton 618, which is sixty-six billion times the mass of the sun.

If you play it back real fast, it gives you at least a sense of just how small our pale blue dot really is. And that's all the time we've got for this week. We'll be back next weekend with an all-new This Week in Outer Space.