In case you need a break from your Twitter timeline or Facebook news feed, here’s something that might make you and your problems feel instantly insignificant: The Size of Space. Designed by Neal Agarwal, it’s a website that compares your physical size to that of asteroids, planets, and black holes in our universe.
Scroll to the right and you’ll get a sense of how very small your problems are. If not, it’s just fun to geek out about space and how fucking huge galaxies are.
Think the sun is big? It’s tiny compared to Betelgeuse, the actual name for a supergiant star some 643 lightyears away from Earth. But Betelgeuse is nothing when you take into account the size of the M87 blackhole, photographed for the first time earlier this year and estimated to span 37 billion kilometres. (For comparison, Earth’s diameter is somewhere around 12,700 kilometres.)
Keep scrolling and you’ll find entire galaxies like Andromeda, which weighs 800 billion times the mass of the sun and might one day collide with the Milky Way.
And if you’re looking to waste a little more time, check out the rest of Agarwal’s handy tools on his website, including ones that show how many days left until your next holiday and what it’d be like to have a shopping spree on Bill Gates’ dime.
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