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superfishlast Wednesday at 9:39 AM2 repliesview on HN

Wikipedia has a nice size analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...

> […] if the Sun were a ping-pong ball, […] the average distance between stars […] is analogous to one ping-pong ball every 3.2 km (2 mi).

Intuitively this visualization actually makes it seem like stars are pretty close? Usually with galactic dimensions it’s hard for our mere monkey minds to grasp the scales but this is actually pretty easy to imagine.


Replies

peteelast Thursday at 2:12 AM

We really can't grasp just how large the sun is either; the earth would be a grain of sand in that scale. To me that still feels pretty vast

snickerbockerslast Wednesday at 9:55 AM

That's because you're significantly larger than the pingpong ball.

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