The Scale of the Universe

Not often contemplated by the average man is the scale of the universe we are living in. "It's a small world." is a well known quote, song and painfully boring Disney ride, however it's somewhat of an understatement. The real phrase should be, "It's an incredibly minute world." simply because, well, it is. Our earth may seem big to us, heck, even London seems huge to me even though its a rather average sized city in comparison, but in reality it is not. You most likely learnt in primary school, or in some physics lesson, that the Earth on which we live could fit inside The Sun around 1,000,000 times. Already we can barely comprehend the size The Sun must be. It seems small when we look at it in the sky, usually a ball no bigger than a 5 pence piece, however in retrospect it looks something more like this:

from Visual Learning Systems 

 So yeah that's a little scary. But that's only the start, you see. The Sun, one star in the billions in our Galaxy is not huge either. Its roughly average size, maybe a little on the small side. There are stars much bigger, and that's what's even more interesting. In this image here (too high resolution to properly show here) we can see that The Sun, 109 times bigger than Earth, is a mere singular pixel in the photo. We then compare that to the biggest star in the photo, VY Canis Majoris, and we have no words. Then you read this and I tell you that VY Canis Majoris is actually not the biggest star we no of. The award goes to complexly and lovingly named  R136a1. R136a1 is the single largest star known to man, and has a luminosity of almost 8,700,000 times that of The Sun. Its roughly 265 solar masses, which is a unit of measure meaning that it is 265 times the mass of our Sun (which happens to be two nonillion kilograms). That's rather heavy. Thinking about all this hurts, and it hurts even more when you realise that there is not only 1 Galaxy, there are billions and trillions, and these billions and trillions of Galaxies, filled with billions and trillions of stars and planets, clump together to make Super Clusters.

Super Clusters near to earth - From Wikipedia 

The idea of how small we are is actually somewhat painful. No longer will we be able to roam around like we own the place, well we do own the place but the place happens to be horrendously minuscule in the grand scale of things. After trying to comprehend all this your brain should be slightly aching, if its not I haven't tried hard enough informing you, but if it is, I know that feeling, bro. Like I said before, it's not a 'Small World', it's an incredibly minute world.