A Penny For Your Thoughts...Or How About A Trillion Trillion

Do me a favor, imagine one of something.......anything. Or try to imagine one penny. Easy enough, right? Now it's probably not a stretch for you to imagine 10, 100, or even a 1,000 pennies. You may even be able visualize 10,000 or even 100,000 pennies. You'll notice something here, as the numbers get bigger, the harder it gets for you to relate or to comprehend exactly how big the number really is. It makes sense, we are beings who normally don't have to deal with large numbers. Look at our simian cousins, how often do they need to deal with trillions? Our brains are developed to understand what we encounter, we usually don't encounter anything that there are trillions of.

I bring this up because, there are approximately a trillion trillion stars in the known universe. That is 10 to the 24th power!!! Our Milky Way Galaxy only has 600-800 million stars.

That is only .0000000000006% to .0000000000008% of all the stars in the known universe!!!!

Still having trouble grasping these ginormous numbers, then check this out. The MegaPenny Project has put together simple, easy to understand illustrations on numbers. They start of with one penny and they work their way up to one quintillion (10 to the 18th power!). Check out their website here.

So, how many pennies would equal all the stars in the known universe (check out the illustration below)? But we aren't done yet, the illustration below is only showing us what one trillion pennies would look like. Take that block of pennies and multiply it by a trillion and you will have as many pennies as stars.

I originally found the MegaPenny Project site at:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/


1,000,000,016,640
One trillion, sixteen thousand six hundred and forty Pennies
[ One cube measuring 273 x 273 x 273 feet ]



x 273 feet ]