if the earth was the size of a golf ball how big would the universe be?

Question

i need to get my head round the scale of things

Answer 1

I'm sorry, but no one actually knows the answer. Speculation might lead to the golf-ball-in-the-ocean thing but no one actually knows. So everyone who gave an answer is just making up crap.

Answer 2

If Earth were the size of a golfball, the universe would still be the size of the universe.

If Earth were a grain of sand, the universe would still be the size of the universe.

What you must understand is that if the Universe is still expanding, any reference point you use will allways be infinitely smaller than the rest of the universe.

You cannot compare a FIXED number to an INFINITE NUMBER.
you can compare an inch to a mile.
you can compare a mile to a lightyear.
but, you cannot compare am inch,mile or lightyear to INFINITY because there is no answer.

Technically the ratio of Earth's size to the universe would be written as 1 : infinity

The Sun's size ratio compared to the universe would also be 1:Infinity


If the universe did have boundaries though, that is the only time you would be able to use an object as a reference point and compare it to the overall size of the universe.

Then you could compare a grain of sand to the diameter of the Earth's solar system.


Maybe you could say the ratio of Earth was 1 : 10000000000000000000000 X 10(99 power)


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BTW - NICK S as well as many of the other answers I've read are WRONG.

DAVID S is wrong too. HE claims if Earth were a golf ball, the universe would be 50 light years larger.

The Milky Way galaxy alone is 400,000 light years in diameter.
-----here is an excerpt----------
The galactic disk is surrounded by a spheroid halo of old stars and globular clusters approximaly 250,000 to 400,000 light years in diameter. While the disk contains gas and dust obscuring the view in some wavelengths, the spheroid component does not. Active star formation takes place in the disk (especially in the spiral arms, which represent areas of high density), but not in the halo. Open clusters also occur primarily in the disk.

The Sun (and therefore the Earth and Solar System) may be found close to the inner rim of the Orion Arm, in the Local Fluff, at a distance of 7.94±0.42 kpc from the Galactic Center.[9][10][11] The distance between the local arm and the next arm out, the Perseus Arm, is about 6,500 light-years.[12] Our Sun, and thus the solar system, is found in what scientists call the galactic habitable zone.

The Apex of the Sun's Way, or the solar apex, refers to the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way. The general direction of the sun's galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules, at an angle of roughly 86 degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center. The sun's orbit around the galaxy is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the galactic spiral arms and non-uniform mass distributions.

It takes the solar system about 225-250 million years to complete one orbit (a galactic year),[13] and so is thought to have completed about 20-25 orbits during its lifetime or .0008 orbit since the origin of man. The orbital speed of the solar system is 217 km/s, i.e. 1 light-year in ca. 1400 years, and 1 AU in 8 days.

The Hayden Planetarium uses 8.0 kpc in their interactive 3D Milky Way Atlas, which just includes the Galactic Center.

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I wish non math/science majors would stop trying to answer questions like this.

OZZIE IS WRONG TOO

All of their answers place a limit on the size of the universe. WHAT THEY HAVEN'T EVEN CONSIDERED IS THAT THERE ARE OTHER DIMENSIONS. SCIENCE HAS ALLREADY PROVEN THERE ARE OTHER DIMENSIONS.
TIME IS ONE OF THEM.

OZZIE, STOP BULLSHITTING. I HAVE A B.S. in GEOLOGY, a B.S. in Physics and I'm in grad school right now for a M.S. in SCIENCE (PHYSICS) EDUCATION...In 2008 I will be in a PhD program for Quantumphysics which is part of my graduate program....
You are WRONG. OBVIOUSLY WRONG.

Planetary Geology is irrellevant. We are talking about the SIZE OF THE UNIVERSE and the SPACE TIME CONTINUUM. You should have claimed you were a QUANTUM PHYSICIST.

The truth is MAN DOESN'T KNOW HOW large the universe is OR if its expanding. I am giving the questioner a choice between the possibility it is expanding and the possibility it isn't.
All man can do is speculate.
What IS true however is that if you compare a set number to infinity, you get a manifest error.

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Also keep in mind that measurements in space would be measures in PARSECS (parrallax of one arc second) which is a trigonometric measurement (since the Universe expands in 360 degrees)

1 parsec = 3.26156378 light years


If the Universe does have boundaries, I expect the numberto be in the quadrillions of parsecs or maybe even higher.


I also believe that since NATURE causes all free energy with gravitational properties to take the shape of a sphere (i.e. the sun, soap bubbles, atoms, etc) I believe that if the universe did have boundaries, it would likely be shaped like a sphere when viewed from the outside.
HOWEVER, that brings up an important paradox.

HOW COULD YOU VIEW THE UNIVERSE FROM OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE?

Only God would know that one.

Answer 3

Do the sum. With metric, it's easy.

Earth 12500 km

Golf ball 40mm (that's a guess, but whatever)

Earth is then 12500 x 1000 x 1000 mm

That is 12.5 x 10^9 mm

Therefore you have reduced the Earth by a factor of

12.5 x 10^9 divided by 40

That's about 3 x 10^8

or 300 million times reduced linearly.

The "known" universe at last count was about 15 billion lt years across.

That's 15 x 10^9 light years.

Divide that by 3 x 10^8

and you get 5 x 10 = 50 light years.

So, if Earth was the size of a golf ball, the universe would still be 50 light years across.

That is 500 trillion kilometers

Just less than 100 trillion miles.

Easy peasy with metric and powers of 10.

Answer 4

It's a simple ratio question.....you find the inverse ratio of the size of the golf ball c.f the Earth (in inches) then you apply the answer to that to the universe (or more correctly the observable universe).

Taking the diameter of the observable universe as being approximately 26 billion light years (a fair estimate), if the Earth was the size of a golf ball, the universe would be:

26 x 10^9 X (1/253,440,000)

= 102.5884 light years across is your answer:):):)

(This used Earth's diameter as being approx 8000 miles.)

(Also used 2 inches as average golf ball size).


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Nick.....you made a mistake, in your estimates you used only the radius of the universe, not it's diameter, so your figures there should be 30 billion light years and the answer 100 light years :):)

The rest of you guys.....instead of taking the usual route and saying the universe is INFINITELY large (which it's not), both nick and I used the accepted figures for the size of the OBSERVABLE universe. The math is easy........:):)

dslcobra.......I suggest you go back and take your math/science major again. David_s is correct and nick only got the diameter and radius mixed up. As for there not being any math/science majors here....well, my friend, you've just run into one....I'm a Planetary Geologist as well as being an amateur astronomer of 35 years experience. Before you go slagging off about other people's qualifications, I suggest you take a good humble look at your own. Your comments are shot through with factual errors.

You can find them yourself, that way you may learn something.

N.B. Read the print.....that is the Galactic Halo, not the disk itself and when the size of the Galaxy is mentioned it refers to the disk of the Galaxy not the halo.

And BTW.....all you've gone to prove with your little "tirade" about me there is just how little you really know. It hasn't changed anything and all you've done is made a even bigger idiot of yourself. Don't try and make out like you know more than anyone else, because you don't. There are other people here with not only more and higher qualifications, but also considerably more experience than yourself. You do yourself no credit by mouthing off.

Answer 5

The scale of the universe is so vast that the 10-20 or so orders of magnitude difference in size between the Earth and a golf ball become meaningless.

The Universe is REALLY big!

Answer 6

Universe is 156 x 10^9 Light years across despite being ~ 15bn years old...
see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3753115.stm

1 Light year =9.4x10^15m

Therefore the Universe is 156 x 9.4 x 10^24 metres across
=1466 x 10^24 m =1.47 x10^27m

Diameter of earth is 12756 km =1.28 x 10^7 metres
http://www.nasm.si.edu/ceps/etp/earth/earth_facts.html

Therefore the universe is 1.47 x 10^ 27 divided by 1.28x 10^7 times larger than the earth
= 1.15 x 10^20 times larger than the earth.

So if the earth were only the size of a golf ball (say 4cm =0.04m)
in diameter, the universe would be 0.04 x1.15 x 10^20 times bigger which is 0.05 x10^ 20
...or 5 x 10^18 meters.

However, since the 10^18 power is still too large to imagine, I think it would be more instructive to say...
What if the earth were the size of a proton inside the nucleus of an atom...then how big would the universe be?

The proton is 10^-15m diameter. So if the earth were the diameter of a proton, the universe would be
1.15 x10^20 larger (as found above)
...or 1.15 x10^5 m or 115 km across or about
72 miles across.

Answer 7

Let's change the scale a bit. Make the distance from the earth to the sun equal to one inch. The distance from the earth to the moon will be about the thickness of a human hair on this scale. The distance to Pluto will be about a yard.

Now it gets fun. On this scale, the distance to the star closest to the sun is 4.3 *miles*. There would be a few dozen other stars within about a hundred miles of us on this scale. Most of the stars you see at night without a telescope would be within a couple of thousand miles.

On this scale, the Milky way (our galaxy) would be about 100,000 miles across (which is a little over 40% of the distance to the moon). The sun (and earth) are about 30,000 miles from the center.

The Andromeda spiral galaxy would, on this scale, be over 8 times the distance to the moon! But the Andromeda spiral is a *close* galaxy. The major structures in our universe only appear on scales approaching the distance from the earth to the sun (remember, the scale is such that this distance is only one inch!). The farthest things we have seen are about 2-3 times the distance to Pluto.

I hope this helps get your head around things!

Answer 8

Nobody knows... It is assumed that the Universe is endless, therefore even if the earth were the size of a golf ball then it would still be endless. Unfortunately human beings cannot really understand the concept of infinity... Then again we only assume it's endless because we haven't found the end yet... the world may never know... go ask Mister Owl.

Answer 9

We don't know because we've never reached the edge of the universe. Quite possibly if Earth was a golfball, The Universe would be the size of our galaxy.


That's also probably a lot smaller, and our solar system in our galaxy is about the size of a basketball relative to the Earth.

Answer 10

if the earth was the size of a golf ball the universe would be as big as it is now cause the universe is infinite

Answer 11

Probably the size of a few galaxies, at least. Just remember, if the earth was the size of a period at sitting at home plate of a baseball field, pluto would be...jeez, I can't remember. A long ways away still. Read the first couple chapters of "A Short history of nearly everything," by Bill Bryson, he has some really good size analogies in there.