How BIG is Our Solar System?

[Suzuki Johnny]

Again we need the sage advice from the several Pundits on Board

[Herb]

Big enough, but not too big...

[navigator]

Small compared to most.

[Herb]

It shrunk quite a bit when they declared that Pluto isn't a planet...

[Designer]

Wellsir,....it depends.

The diameter of our Solar System is somewhat subjective. It could be defined as ending at the outside edge of the farthest out planets orbit, or one could call it the edge of the heliosphere, or at the farthest observable object.

[navigator]

You would never get to the edge with an electric rocket, unless of course it had onboard solar panels and a few windmills, and throw in some hydrogen fuel cells for good measure.

[Herb]

Just some fun facts.

Let's put it this way to drive from Earth to Pluto at 65 miles an hour it would take almost 6,300 years. The fastest spacecraft we have today takes 9.5 years. When considering that this leaves out the 93 million miles from the Earth to the Sun the solar system is flipping HUGE.

When I was in high school I read a Sci Fi book where they had spaceships with giant sails that would catch the solar wind to travel within the solar system. The solar wind would push them away from the sun and they would use a small rocket to start the fall towards the sun then coast in.

Neat idea. But the sails became useless at about Uranus.

Lots of ideas in the Sci Fi and some of them are coming true.

[FallenAngel]

You would never get to the edge with an electric rocket, unless of course it had onboard solar panels and a few windmills, and throw in some hydrogen fuel cells for good measure.

and 2 or 3 really super duper long extension cords or maybe 4

[hillsy v2]

You would never get to the edge with an electric rocket, unless of course it had onboard solar panels and a few windmills, and throw in some hydrogen fuel cells for good measure.

and 2 or 3 really super duper long extension cords or maybe 4

Or a windmill. As long as the birds didn't fly into it you'd be fine.

[FallenAngel]

You would never get to the edge with an electric rocket, unless of course it had onboard solar panels and a few windmills, and throw in some hydrogen fuel cells for good measure.

and 2 or 3 really super duper long extension cords or maybe 4

Or a windmill. As long as the birds didn't fly into it you'd be fine.

A Cylon Space base wind turbine perhaps??

[MadCow]

Again we need the sage advice from the several Pundits on Board

COmpared to the universe, less than a grain of sand.

[Suzuki Johnny]

Does the Universe End?
Many cosmologists agree that the Universe is flat and might expand forever. Others theorize that the Universe will end one day. Perhaps the most logical answer is that when all the stars reach the end of their life spans, the Universe will end as the light will end, everything will be covered in darkness.
Maybe the Universe won’t end there if other means of survival are available. Some believe that the Universe will begin to cool as it expands, and life will cease to exist because of this. This theory is named the Big Freeze.

Another popular scenario suggests that our Universe will stop expanding, and will actually reverse this process. When this happens, the Universe will re-collapse, and it will possibly lead to a reformation that will start with another Big Bang. This scenario is called the Big Crunch.

A third popular theory is named the Big Rip. This theory states that everything will be torn to shreds, including atoms. It will happen when the theoretical energy known as dark energy, becomes stronger than gravity. No matter the case, what is certain is that these apocalyptic scenarios won’t happen for billions of years to come.

Where Does Space End?
Space doesn’t end because it is constantly expanding, faster than the speed of light itself. From our point of view, space end at approximately 93 billion light-years away from us, but that isn’t the end of the Universe. It is only how far we can see.

Will the Universe Last Forever?
It is unknown if the Universe will last forever, but most likely, we won’t even be there to see it. We currently do not know if the Univers will stop expanding, and if it does, what would this imply.
Many have proposed several apocalyptic scenarios, like the ones aforementioned above, but isn’t that just typical of us? The Universe might just well last forever, but one thing is true. We are very far from answering such questions.

Everything in the Universe is in motion, and it appears that many celestial objects, such as galaxies, are moving away from us. Perhaps, this is the true end of the Universe, when things will be so far apart that nothing could be reached anymore, and nothing could be concluded as being the Universe anymore since everything will be so far apart, we wouldn’t even know its there.

Did you Know?
Around 550 people have been into Space, and only three of them have died in accidents.
The smallest thing in the Universe that we currently know of is the atom.
The biggest thing we have discovered so far in our Universe is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It is a supercluster which has a diameter of around 10 billion light-years.
Many believe that our Universe is only one of a set of separate universes, collectively known as the multiverse.
The word cosmos, rather than Universe, implies viewing the Universe as a complex and orderly system or deity – the opposite of chaos.
The observable Universe is 93 billion light-years, yet, our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just 100,000 light-years in diameter. It would take us endless generations just to explore our galaxy, let alone the Universe.
Another ancient structure is the galaxy supercluster known as the Hyperion Supercluster. This celestial object has more than four quadrillion solar masses, and many estimate that it formed just 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
Universe means “whole,” and it comes from the Latin word “universus.”

[Suzuki Johnny]

Did you know?

Our Sun takes around 250 million years to orbit the galaxy. This means that it’s already made about 20 orbits around the galaxy since it was born.

In an interesting way, we all orbit around a black hole, the one in the galactic center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*.

It is believed that the Milky Way galaxy has around 2 rogue planets for every star. They are planets that have been thrown out of their solar system.


The Milky Way is rotating in a clockwise direction.
The Milky Way is surrounded by more than 150 ancient groups of stars, some of which are among the oldest in the universe. They are called globular clusters.

We have only around 75 years since we discovered that we live in a galaxy, out of many other galaxies.

The outermost regions of the Milky Way suggest that it hasn’t undergone any mergers with large galaxies in the last 10 billion years. This is unusual when compared to other similar spiral galaxies like our own - Andromeda for example.

[Suzuki Johnny]

Number of galaxies and stars

The observable universe contains as many as an estimated 2 trillion galaxies and, overall, as many as an estimated 1024 stars – more stars (and earth-like planets) than all the grains of beach sand on planet Earth.

As mentioned earlier, the estimated number of galaxies was reduced in 2021 to several hundred billion based on data from New Horizons. The estimated total number of stars in an inflationary universe (observed and unobserved) is 10100.