A Cosmic Perspective

The Universe, which we once though to be at the center of, is now known to be a immensely vast and still expanding space. Our presence in it turned out to be far smaller than we assumed, just a drop in the Cosmic ocean.

The distance that goes from our position to the true horizon is about 4,7 Km (due to Earth's curvature);

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Our planet's diameter is 12.756,32 Km, something like 2.714 times the horizon's measure;

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The Sun stands at about 150 million Km far: almost 11.759 Earths would fit in between. At this distance the Sun's light, travelling at approx. 300.000 Km/s in vacuum, takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach us. From here on the measurement unit used will be the "light-year", which a single unit corresponds to 9,46 trillion Km;

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Proxima Centauri is the Solar System's nearest star and is located 4,3 light-years away from the Sun, meaning over 40 trillion Km and something like 270.000 times the Earth-Sun distance;

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Our Milky Way galaxy has a approx. 50.000 light-years radius and the Sun is somewhat half way far from it's center, at about 28.000 light-years;

And besides the Milky Way galaxy the Universe is known to have more than 170 billion galaxies, each separated by more than a million light-years: the farthest galaxy found stays at 13,37 billion light-years from Earth. And yet who knows how many more Universes exists...

Our perspective of the Cosmos has changed. We're no longer at the center, we're no longer the purpose of this Universe; now we're just a couple of pixels in this seemingly infinite Cosmic picture, trying to find our place among this endless space we share with so many other stars and perhaps other forms of life.