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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.



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


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


Sol is about 1.39 million kilometres in diameter.

A table tennis ball is 40mm in diameter.

That makes the sun about 34,750,000,000 times bigger than a pingpong ball.


I find some of these numbers hard to believe sometimes. 40 mm seems really big for a table tennis ball.


It's 0.00019884 furlongs, if that helps.


Or 0.0008 OSP (Olympic Swimming Pools)

Edit to add: length, not volume


Or 0.000587613 smoots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot




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