[Colonol Dekker]

THIS is a completely novel AMAZING tool on newgrounds that some inspired genius has made.......

music is ok too

[StarSlayer]

This isn't the thing where they compare the planets, then the planets to the sun, then the sun to other suns, and so on and so for until it makes a crack about someone's overweight ex girlfriend is it?  If so its been around a long time.

[BloodEagle]

Pretty damned nifty.  

[Snail]

Wow, that thing is awesome...

[Demitri]

That is quite impressive

[watsisname]

Wow, nice.  I like how well it demonstrates the vast difference in size between subatomic particles and the Planck length.  But I do have to nitpick about the rendition of the size of the observable universe, since a lot of people get this wrong.

The universe is currently estimated to be ~13.7 billion years old.  But this does NOT mean that the edge of the observable universe is 13.7 billion light years away.  The only way this would be true is if spacetime on cosmological scales was flat, and it is clearly not due to expansion.  The true edge of the observable universe is about 46.5 billion light years from us.

As for the true size of the *entire* universe, it's unknown, but probably many magnitudes greater than what we can see.

Edit:  Durr, that's supposed to be Planck, not plank. :O

[Nutcase]

On the universe size: It's numbers the average Human can just barely comprehend (with a small 'if' on the side).
Does it even matter?

[watsisname]

No, not really. =P  But it's science for the sake of science, and I'd much rather we try to understand as much as we can about as much as we can, rather than leave things as mystical unknowns.  Besides, imagine if we still held to the belief that the sun, moon, and planets were perfect, unexplainable heavenly spheres and nobody ever tried to learn otherwise.  

[Locutus of Borg]

If nothing can go faster than the speed of light, then why is the observable universe totally encompassed by the actual universe.

[BloodEagle]

Because space-time is curved? [/complete guess]

[Aardwolf]

Ooo, this was mildly entertaining!

[General Battuta]

If nothing can go faster than the speed of light, then why is the observable universe totally encompassed by the actual universe.

Space-time can expand faster than light.

[watsisname]

If nothing can go faster than the speed of light, then why is the observable universe totally encompassed by the actual universe.

*Simple answer* -->  Because of the expansion of space itself.  

Take for example the case of a universe in which the expansion rate increases over time.  If this occurs, then objects far away from us will become increasingly redshifted, and eventually light will no longer be able to reach us from those objects because they recede from us too quickly.  The boundary of the observable universe would thus shrink in towards us, and more and more of the universe would lay beyond the boundary.

[Mongoose]

Ooh, I always like these sorts of things.  (Lulz at "Pronounced YER uh niss" )  Even as a physics major, though, I've never even heard of the concept of "preons" being building blocks of quarks; apparently I missed something somewhere.  It really is amazing just how much smaller the Planck length is than anything else.  Eta Carinae sure is something, isn't it?

[ssmit132]

Nice little thing, I prefer this to those videos since you can look at it at your own pace and play around with it.

[Galemp]

Beautiful.

[Colonol Dekker]

Our sun's pretty tiny compared to neighbouring stars isn't it. . . . .
 
 
Also there's no blue whale which is a must in any one of these gadgets but I forgive it for showing me that the USA is bigger than mercury which I didn't know

[Mongoose]

Yeah, that surprised me too.  I guess a few thousand miles does get fairly hefty if you stretch it out flat.

[Pred the Penguin]

Our sun is tiny...

[Mongoose]

Not if you're a quark.  Or a human, for that matter.