Three stars for the price of one, with planets orbiting around them. Here's our closest neighbour, Alpha Centauri. This square is 10 to the 16 metres, the distance light travels in one year, one light year.
We're heading into interstellar space, our Sun is just one of billions of stars, and still at this distance, the night sky looks very similar to what we see at home. Both were launched in 1977, the year the Eames were working on Powers of Ten. In 2012, the Voyager 1 spacecraft became the first human artefact to make this journey, followed in 2018 by its twin, Voyager 2. 10 to the 13 metres, and we're moving out of the solar system. There's the orbit of Pluto, one of the dwarf planets of the Kuiper belt. Finally, we reach the orbit of the outer planets, the gas giants, but just specks at this distance. Since 2010, the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory has been using an extreme ultraviolet filter to monitor the activity of our Sun. Here comes the orbit of Venus, then Mars, and now Mercury. Let's illustrate the orbits of the planets in our solar system, otherwise this could get a bit dull. Even as we accelerate away, the stars appear stationary because they're so much further away.
THE POWER OF TEN SHOW FULL
The Earth is now just a pale blue dot in a sky full of stars. This is the time it takes for light to reach us from the moon's orbit, the age of moonlight. The invisible magnetosphere shields us from the dangerous ionising radiation of space. One million metres, or 10 to the 6 metres, we've long left Earth's atmosphere, and soon we'll see the whole planet. From here on, human activity will be lost to sight, we're at the scale of countries. 10 to the 5 metres, this is the distance the International Space Station travels in 10 seconds. Ten thousand metres, or 10 to the 4 metres, this is the distance a supersonic plane travels in 10 seconds, and we're now reaching the highest altitude flown by such a plane. One kilometre, though our picnickers are indistinguishable now, we can still clearly see the impact of human activity on the world. Well, if they're running at 43km/h, just under the speed of your cat. This square is 100 metres wide, the distance someone can run in 10 seconds. The movement may seem linear, but we're actually accelerating exponentially into the distance. This square is ten metres wide, and in 10 seconds, the next square will be 10 times that. We'll start with a scene one metre wide, viewed from one metre away, and every 10 seconds, we're going to move out to 10 times further away, so the scene will be 10 times wider.
Though this time, we're on the island of Sicily in Italy, rather than Lake Michigan. Over 40 years later, as a humble homage to this groundbreaking film, we're going to take a similar journey through time and space and see how our understanding has changed along the way. It took the viewers on a journey from a picnic blanket near Lake Michigan to the edge of the known Universe, and back again. CAPTION: HOW BIG IS OUR UNIVERSE? MADE IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE OPEN UNIVERSITY BRIAN COX: In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames, hugely influential American designers, released one of the most elegant and creative pieces of science communication of modern times Powers of Ten. Trying to explain it in a way that's easy to understand, well that's a whole other challenge. Made with academic consultant Professor Andrew Norton, Professor of Astrophysics Education, The Open University PROFESSOR BRIAN COX: Trying to comprehend how big the Universe is is one of those questions that astrophysicists grapple with all the time.
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