Fun facts from modern Astronomy

Tim Piatenko
2 min readMar 26, 2021

It’s always hard for me to remember the scales of things… so here are some facts I keep learning and re-learning put in perspective:

  • There are about 100 stars in the Milky Way for every person on Earth
  • There are about 100 Galaxies in the Universe for every person on Earth
  • We are closer to another (small) galaxy than the other side of our own
  • That galaxy is just learning of prehistoric modern human migrations
  • The other side of Milky Way is learning about Homo Erectus…
  • Andromeda galaxy is learning about earliest Hominids
  • The Sun is 100 times wider than the Earth
  • Many stars are 100 times bigger than the Sun
  • You can take 100 deep breaths, while light travels from the Sun to you
  • 10 times around the Earth is the same as distance to the Moon
  • Saturn is as far from Jupiter as Jupiter is from the Sun
  • And double it again for Uranus and again for Neptune

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Tim Piatenko

I’m a Caltech particle physics PhD turned Data Scientist. Russia → Japan → US. Also on Mastodon @timoha@mastodon.world / @timoha@newsie.social 🐘