The Scale
of the Cosmos
Zoom
outward in steps of 100
•It has taken twelve steps of 100
to go from human scale to the scale of the cosmos
•Remember the gap when moving outside our solar
system
•How do we conveniently deal with this large of a
range of sizes?
•Use different units for different
types of scales (i.e. km, AU,
light-years)
•But hard to compare, hard to do
calculations
•Use scientific notation (and
metric “prefixes”)
17,000 ly
1,700,000 ly
170,000,000 ly