The Scale of the Universe

Hubble Deep Field (1996) NASA

Have you ever wondered about the scale of the universe from the smallest microscopic entity up to the extent of our vast universe? Scale of the Universe presents this concept beautifully using simple illustrations, a horizontal slider, and minimal text. It spans 62 orders of magnitude: 35 orders of magnitude smaller than you, and 27 orders of magnitude larger. Here’s a quick sample of what you will find along the journey.

10^-35 meter                         String, Planck length, quantum foam (not confirmed)

10^-14.7 meter                       (10 yoctometers) proton

3 x 10^-9 meter                    (3 nanometers) DNA

5 x 10^-3 meter                    (5 millimeters) grain of rice

1.7 x 10⁰ meters                (1.7 meters) human

1 x 10² meters                   (100 meters) Redwood tree

1.27 x 10⁷ meters             (12,700 kilometers) Earth

1.4 x 10⁹ meters                (1.4 million kilometers) Sun

1.2 x 10²¹ meters              (120,000 light-years) Milky Way Galaxy

1.27 x 10²⁶ meters            (1.27 billion light-years) Distance to the Hubble Deep Field, a seemingly empty spot in the sky near the Big Dipper for which the Hubble Space Telescope did a long exposure photograph in 1995 and discovered 1500 distant galaxies.

9.3 x 10²⁶ meters              (93 billion light-years) Radius of the Universe. The age of the universe is 13.7 billion years but it is expanding.

1.6 x 10²⁷ meters              (160 billion light-years) Observable Universe

The widely acclaimed ten-minute film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames (1968) is a narrated version of the same concept as Scale of the Universe.

Search the Collins Library catalog on the subject terms ‘cosmological distances,’ or ‘physical measurements,’ to find books and other resources on this topic. Here are a few titles to explore.

• Asimov, Isaac. 1983. The Measure of the Universe.  New York: Harper & Row.
• Bishop, Owen. 1984. Yardsticks of the Universe. New York: P. Bedrick Books.
• Cadogan, Peter H. 1985. From Quark to Quasar:Notes on the Scale of the Universe. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Van Helden, Albert. 1985. Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Submitted by Elizabeth Knight, Interim Science Librarian