Let Me Tell You About Scale

I remember the first time I really thought about how big the solar system is. I was on a long road trip, and I started wondering how long it would actually take to drive to the moon. Turns out, at highway speeds, it would take about six months! That's assuming you could drive through space, which you can't, but you get the idea.

The Sun Is Really Far

The sun is about 93 million miles away. Light, the fastest thing in the universe, takes about eight minutes to reach us from the sun. That means when you look at the sun, you're seeing it as it was eight minutes ago. Wild, right?

And the sun is just one star among billions in our galaxy. The Milky Way has somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars, depending on who you ask. Nobody's really counted!