Reminds me of Sagan's comments upon seeing the Saturn photo of earth through the rings.

How the fuck anyone can postulate a fictional being KNOWING the shear vastness of the universe, AND our tiny little island in the middle of all this and stupidly think it was all put here for us is astounding. It was understandable when we didn't know better. But to do such now is willful ignorance,

BUT DAMNED PEOPLE, that is just 6 million miles. In one of billions of solar systems in ONE galaxy in a universe of billions of galaxies.

Bob Spense often reminds me of some things in the universe that amaze me as far as size and power and distance.

If you plucked out our sun and put in the biggest red giant we have found so far, it's surface would extend past Saturn. That means our sun is a tiny wimp by comparison.

When you, or anyone posts pictures like this, it confirms my position that ALL MYTHS and superstitions and deity claims are childish and needless when compared to the awesome reality we can study.

Nice pic. I also love the ones of Hubble and deep space which shows how big the universe is.

When you realize that less than a mlillionth of the Universe, in the crudest, most optimistic estimate, is even visible to the sharpest of human eyes, you have to wonder WTF, why this supposed God would bother creating all that other stuff if we were the object of the exercise...

He was really board?

He had a really big case of obsessive/compulsive disorder?

Just didn't know when to, or couldn't, stop?

He likes shiny objects?

Don't you dare hijack my line "I like shiny objects" and then attribute it to a fictional inept cosmic dictator. THATS MY LINE!

Left over scrap from an even more ridiculously large project?

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OK, as an amateur astronomer, I can put some numbers out for the size of the universe.

The farthest object visible to the naked eye is the Andromeda Galaxy. Roughly 2.5 million light years away. Good luck seeing it in any city though as all of the light pollution is too strong. Even if you do live in the middle of nowhere, it will be a faint bit of fuzzy about a quarter of the size of your pinky nail held at arms length. That is only the core though. With a good telescope at very low magnification it shows as several times the diameter of the full moon.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061228.html

The farthest visible light image we have ever seen at all is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image which shows galaxies out to 13 billion light years.

The farthest back in time we can see ever is the WMAP microwave data set which shows the universe when it was only 300,000 years old. We can't image farther back than that because at that point, the whole universe was as hot as the surface of a star. Several researchers have tried to use the same techniques developed for probing the interior of the Sun but that is very controversial because there are a couple of claims to have actually seen evidence of events occurring outside of spacetime.

The farthest that we shall ever see (and this is only a theoretical exercise) is called the cosmic event horizon which is a bit over 40 billion light years away. At that distance, the speed of recession of galaxies will exceed the speed of light.

Technically, it's a yellow main sequence dwarf. So no, not the biggest and certainly not the most energetic.

Please don't mislead people with your cryptic comments:

A fuller answer will be less likely to confuse people.

Oh, sorry. I was thinking of Wolf-Rayet stars when I made that post, that actually sometimes undergo something called a pair instability supernova where the "progenitor" appears nearly as bright as the core of many galaxies, at least at a nonvisible wavelength (xray). In "cryptic" terms I guess you could say it's some really bright shit. But even while undergoing stable fusion, the Sun pales in comparison.

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That really does not work out on astronomical terms Kap. Wolf Rayet stars are simply the largest ones out there. Calling the sun small on those grounds is analogous to saying that an apartment building is smaller than a skyscraper. It is still going to be larger than the far more numerous smaller buildings.

Also, while pair instability supernovae are brighter than galaxies, so too are all other smaller supernovae. In fact, the smallest type is of great interest to astronomers. In a binary system with a white dwarf and a red giant, the white dwarf can suck material off of the companion and eventually end up at a critical mass to blow. Because the mass is exactly critical, such events are a standard candle for establishing the distance of specific galaxies.

Browser and keyboard are acting up, so bear with me. (oh WHY didn't I just stick with old version firefox instead of upgrading??)

Oh? In what way?

Correction... this type of star is the hottest, and amongst the most massive (NGC 3603-A1), though it plays second fiddle to O-type hypergiants. By virtue of E=mc²  it is the type with the second greatest amount of potential energy, so I suppose "most energetic" isn't the most precise term to use.

So my choice of words "does not work out" because they aren't as broad or as all-inclusive as you or Bob would like them to be? That does appear to be the implication, although one cannot tell without asking.

Well, if you want me to be more inclusive, there are hypergiants, supergiants, regular giants, and subgiants and there is also what the sun will turn into just before blowing up. Are there a lot of skimpy Population I candidates smaller and less bright than the sun? Sure there are, just as there are quite a few Population II stars more significant in every way to the sun.

Kap,

neither I nor AiG denied that there are much bigger objects than the Sun, so pointing out examples of such objects is beside the point, however interesting such objects may be.

The point is that there is an enormous range of sizes of stars, and the Sun, as we know it now, while truly dwarfed by a number of these other objects, is nevertheless larger than most objects classified as stars. It is not as insignificant as once thought, in terms of size vs numbers.

Nothing you have said contradicts this.