Imagining the smallest of the small and the largest of the large in the universe can be a mind-bendingly difficult task. This awesome interactive graphic, that let's you slide from an infinitesimally tiny strange quark all the way out to the gigantic Eridanus Supervoid hanging around near the ragged edges of our observable universe, makes it much easier, though.
Made by brothers Cary and Michael Huang, the graphic takes objects of a familiar size — a person, a sunflower, an extinct T-Rex, the Eiffel Tower — and lets you use them as a scale to measure objects of a far less familiar size (a DNA molecule, a x-ray wavelength, Polaris, a dwarf galaxy, and Minecraft's world, for instance). By either zooming in or out in from a familiarly sized object in powers of ten (riffing on the visuals from this famous "Powers of 10" video), the very large and the very small suddenly seem a lot more graspable.
The scrolling graphic, which is all kinds of fun, can be found here, or just watch the video below.
onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A scale for the size of the universe, from quarks to quasars