Powers of ten: from a proton to the observable universe

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1 / 19 Start with two peopleA man of 172.5 cm and a woman of 159.6 cm on tiles one metre wide. The ruler along the bottom shows where you are: 10 to the power 0 is one metre. Scroll, pinch or drag the ruler to change it.

Drag to turn. Scroll or pinch to zoom.

01
Start with two people
A man of 172.5 cm and a woman of 159.6 cm on tiles one metre wide. The ruler along the bottom shows where you are: 10 to the power 0 is one metre. Scroll, pinch or drag the ruler to change it.
02
An ant and a coin
A hundred times smaller. A pavement ant 4.8 mm long walks among grains of sand, next to a 500-won coin 26.5 mm across.
03
A hair and blood cells
A hair 90 µm wide lies on the ground. On top of it rests an E. coli bacterium, 2 µm long, beside red blood cells 7.5 µm across.
04
A virus on a bacterium
A T4 phage stands on the bacterium on its tail fibres. Its head is 120 nm long, far smaller than a wavelength of visible light.
05
The double helix
Inside the phage head the DNA is packed tight. Close up it is a helix 2.5 nm wide that turns every 3.4 nm, with water molecules around it.
06
A hydrogen atom
A cloud of dots 0.106 nm across shows where the electron is likely to be. The red ball in the middle marks the nucleus, drawn far too big.
07
Inside the proton
At 10 to the power minus 15 metres the proton fills the view: two up quarks and one down quark held by gluons. On the way down the screen was empty for four powers of ten.
08
A tower and a pitch
Back up to the tower, 554.5 m tall. A football pitch, an A380 and the ghost of Burj Khalifa, 828 m, are drawn at the same scale.
09
Seoul
Seoul fills the view, 605.24 km² with the Han River across it. The pale cone at the edge is Everest at the same scale.
10
The Earth and its satellites
The Earth, 12,742 km across, with the orbits of the space station (400 km), GPS satellites (20,200 km) and geostationary satellites (35,786 km).
11
The Moon inside the Sun
The Moon circles 384,400 km from Earth and 30 Earths fit in that gap. The Sun drawn around the Earth holds the whole orbit.
12
The inner planets
Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The Earth is one astronomical unit from the Sun. The dashed circle shows how big Betelgeuse is.
13
The edge of the Sun's bubble
The Kuiper Belt runs from 30 to 50 AU. Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause at 122 AU in 2012 and Voyager 2 at 119 AU in 2018.
14
The nearest star
Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light-years away. The tick marks are one light-year apart. The faint shell is the Oort cloud.
15
Our neighbours
19 star systems within 12 light-years, placed by their position in the sky. Sirius is 8.6 light-years away.
16
The Milky Way
A disc about 100,000 light-years across. The small ring marks the Sun, 26,000 light-years from the centre. The Magellanic Clouds lie outside.
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The Local Group
Andromeda, 2.5 million light-years away, and the Triangulum Galaxy share this group with the Milky Way and dozens of dwarf galaxies.
18
Laniakea
About 500 million light-years across. Galaxies stream towards the Great Attractor; the Local Group sits near the edge.
19
The observable universe
About 93 billion light-years across. Galaxies form a web of filaments; the shell is the cosmic microwave background. This is the end of the ruler.

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