Describe the overall scale and structure of the

universe.

8th grade Science

Do you know the answers to these questions?

•What are the main structures of the universe?•How big are they compared to each other?•What is a galaxy?•Which one contains our solar system?•How big is our galaxy?•What is a supercluster?•Which one contains our galaxy?•How big is our supercluster?•What is a filament structure?•How big is the known universe?

Most of the Universe is made up of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. That is the all that black stuff out there in space. We are not sure what it is. It is not like matter on Earth. It is not a liquid, solid or gas. The only way we know it is there is because it seems to create gravitational pull on other structures out in space.

The planet Earth is just one structure in the solar system. The diameter of the Earth is 12,700 miles across. How much bigger is the solar system?

A solar system is a collection of planets, asteroids and dust orbiting around a star.

The diameter of the solar system is 7 billion miles.

Galaxies are too big to measure in miles. Instead we use light years. A light year is the distance light can travel in 1 year.

Light can travel 186,000 miles a second! That is about 6 trillion

miles in a year!

A galaxy is made of planets, stars, gases and dust held together by gravity. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. It is a spiral galaxy. This means that the outside arms spin around the center. The center of the galaxy is theorized to be a black hole. Don’t worry, our solar system is 30,000 light years away from the that black hole! Our galaxy measures approximately 100,000 light years in diameter. It takes 225 million years for our solar system to make one trip around the Milky Way!

YOU LIVE HERE!

A super cluster is a lot of galaxies that are relatively close together. The name of the super cluster that holds our galaxy is called the Virgo super cluster. The diameter of our super cluster is approximately 100 million light years. That means it would take a beam of light 100 million years to get from one side to another.

Milky way galaxy

Have you ever wondered what a

picture of the universe might look like?

All the super clusters connected together make up the filament

structure/universe. This is the largest structure in the universe.

More?

The diameter of the universe is estimated to be 100 billion light years from one side to the

other.

Can you find where Earth is?

Earth 12,700 miles(diameter)

Solar System 7 billion miles(diameter)

Milky Way Galaxy

100,000 light years(diameter)

Virgo super cluster

100 million light years(diameter)

Universe/Filaments

100 billion light years(diameter)

How do we measure the scale of Scale of the Space?

Light Year: the distance light can travel in one year.