>>11957018Hi! My name is Robert Burnham. The cosmological distances are so incomprehensibly large, I created a model to help you understand them. You've most certainly encountered my model before, even if you've never heard of me.
In my model, sometimes referred to as the Burnham scale, a speck two-thousandths of a mm across representing the Earth lies one inch away from a speck of dust a hundredth of an inch across representing the Sun. The planet Mercury is four-tenths of an inch from the Sun, Venus nearly three-quarters of an inch, Mars at 1.6 inches, Jupiter at 5 inches, Saturn at just under 10 inches, Uranus at 19 inches, Neptune at 30 inches, and Pluto at 39.5 inches. One way of visualizing the Burnham scale is to stand with an outstretched arm; the tips of your fingers to the center of your body approximates the radial distance of Neptune or Pluto from the Sun.
Alpha Centauri is 4.5 lightyears away. On the Burnham scale, it's 4.5 miles away.
Since all stars in the Galaxy are several lightyears apart, with each represented by a speck of dust, each star in the Galaxy is separated from its neighbors by miles. They're practically isolated.
The span of the Milky Way Galaxy on this scale is about 100000 miles. It's enormously big compared with the Solar System: 6.336 billion inches vs 80 inches for the Solar System.
The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million lightyears away. That's 2.5 million miles away on the Burnham scale.
Andromeda and the Milky Way are members of the Local Group of galaxies, which is itself is part of galaxy clusters - which are part of galaxy superclusters.
The model is fairly accurate, because there are 63360 inches in a mile and there are 63294 Astronomical Units in a lightyear.
While my model is well-known and often used to help illustrate the vast distances of the cosmos, it's a curious fact of the modern age that the people who believe gravity is the dominant force in the universe have never deeply engaged my model.
