UNIVERSE

The scale of the human body is in a phi scale relationship between the proton and the observable universe. Astronomers use light because it travels at the inconceivable speed of 300,000 km per second. Nothing can go faster. Therefore, in one second, light would go around the Earth seven and a half times, and it would take 8 minutes to cover the distance that separates us from the Sun. If light has to travel from the Sun to Neptune, it will take a little more than 4 hours. An analogy can help us to place the Earth among the planets of the Solar System, taking the distance between the Sun and Neptune as the one that separates the goals in a soccer field 100 meters long, the Earth would be 3.3 meters from the goal of the Sun, inside the small area, and Jupiter, at 17.3 meters, would be located on the edge of the penalty area. On that same scale, the diameter of Jupiter would be barely three millimeters, that of the Earth would be a few tenths of a millimeter, and that of the Sun would be around three centimeters. This also gives us an idea of how empty space is. Proxima Centauri The Sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in our Galaxy. How far away is the nearest star? Proxima Centauri, which is what it is called, is 4.2 light years away. This indicates that light, at 300,000 km/s, takes 4.2 years to travel the nearly 40 trillion (or millions of millions) of kilometers that separate us from this star. Continuing with the previous analogy in which a soccer field corresponds to the distance between the Sun and Neptune, we would need almost 9,000 fields, one after the other (the distance, in a straight line, between Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela), to arrive at our closest stellar neighbor, knowing that all the planets of the Solar System would be in the first one. Although travel through our Galaxy is quite common in fictional stories like Stars Wars, the reality is quite different. It is enough to consider that the average separation between the stars of the Milky Way is 10 million times the diameter of a typical star and, therefore, interstellar travel is currently impractical. The extension of the Galaxy is 100,000 light years. To visualize it, we need to change the analogy. If our football field now corresponded to the entire Milky Way, a giant star would have, on that scale, the diameter of the cold virus -ultramicroscopic- and the distance between the Sun and Proxima Centauri would be the size of an ant. It seems that galaxies prefer to be in a group: the gravitational attraction gives them that "social" character. Our Galaxy, for example, is part of the so-called Local Group, which consists of about thirty galaxies, of which Andromeda, the Milky Way and the Triangulum Galaxy are the largest and have a majestic spiral design, and the rest are dwarf galaxies. that orbit -like satellites- around the largest ones. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away and is the farthest celestial object that we can see from Earth with the naked eye, without the aid of optical instruments. In our model, it would be like another soccer field located 2.5 km away (approximately the separation between two stadiums in the same city, for example the Valencia stadium and the Levante stadium); that is to say, we could visualize the Local Group of galaxies as a city a few kilometers long with 3 main stadiums and about thirty mini stadiums or tennis courts. cumulus clouds There are denser groups of galaxies, the clusters, which can house several thousand galaxies, such as Virgo, which is 65 million light years away. The light that our telescopes capture today from the galaxies in this cluster began its journey when the Tyrannosaurus rex walked on the Earth's surface; Thus, the image we see of these galaxies does not correspond to their current appearance, but to what they had 65 million years ago. If something astronomically observable happened today in any of them -such as the explosion of a star in a supernova- we would have to wait another 65 million years to observe on Earth. Astronomy, then, does cosmic archaeology, since, since the speed of light is finite, objects are not observed as they are today, but rather as they were when the light left them: looking far away is looking into the remote past of the universe. . Thanks to this fact, the evolution of the cosmos can be understood, from the primitive universe to the present day. With telescopes located on the ground and in space, it has been possible to carry out a true three-dimensional cartography that reveals the existence of structures even larger than clusters of galaxies: superclusters, which form a cosmic fabric with filaments and walls that enclose large voids in which practically no luminous matter is detected. We observe galaxies billions of light years away; the radiation The information that we capture today from the most remote originated long before the formation of the Solar System. But since the age of the universe is finite, the part of the universe that we can observe is only a (probably very small) fraction of the whole. Today the universe is estimated to be 14 billion years old, so the radius of our observable universe expressed in terms of the distance light has traveled in that time would be 14 billion light-years (actually the distance current to the points that would have emitted that light would be even greater due to the expansion of the universe). Going back to our last analogy - in which the Milky Way is represented by a football field? the radius of the entire observable universe would be, on that scale, slightly larger than the diameter of the Earth. But where is the last frontier? We should ask cosmologists and not believe them if they tell us, like explorers in the past: "There are dragons beyond!" In the universe in which we inhabit there is matter, this itself, when it comes together, forms things, objects that we can see with the naked eye and others that are not so visible to us, in this chapter we will try to show the reader the different scales that the universe has. universe, from elementary particles to clusters, passing through the same human being and what he knows. We will start from the smallest, to the largest in our universe. Let's take the human being as a "medium" scale between the micro and the macro, and of course, with this we will also take meters as a base, so any measurement that the reader finds (10x or Yx10x) will be based on meters. What is the smallest thing in our universe? Until now, we know that the smallest scale to measure something is the Planck length, this is equivalent to 10-35 or up to 0.0000000001 yoctometers, with it you could measure the strings or p-branes of string theory or the Quantum foam in space and time posed by the quantum theory of loops.… A yoctometer (ym) is like measuring 10-24 meters and it is precisely in this measurement that elementary particles such as neutrinos are found (it is known that leptons are very small, even smaller than quarks). A little above 10 yoctometers, by measure 10-22 we find elementary particles called "quarks" starting with the top quark, which is the smallest of all quarks. Between the range 10-19.7 and 10-19 we find larger particles such as high energy neutrinos or bottom and charm quarks; going a little further, in the attometer measure (am) which is approximately 10-18 meters, we find even larger particles such as the strange, down and up quarks, even a little higher, in the range 10-17 we find the range As far as the weak nuclear force goes, it is worth mentioning that of the 4 fundamental forces, this is the one with the lowest rank. Now we enter the range of femtometers (fm) that are about 10-15 meters in this range we find composite particles such as the proton and neutron (which make up all baryonic matter), in the range 10-14.7 and 10-14 we find all the atomic nuclei of the chemical elements (from Hydrogen to Uranium) and also the so famous electron. Now we come to the picometers (pm) that with about 10-12 meters, right in the range 10-11.7 we find the gamma ray waves, which are the smallest in the electromagnetic spectrum. In the range 10-11 and 10-10.3 we can find some basic atoms such as hydrogen and helium or even carbon. Now we go to the range of nanometers (nm) that is worth approximately 10-9 meters, from the range 10-9.1 to 10-8-9 we can find from atoms of more complex elements such as cesium, to Phospholipids, passing through basic molecules such as of water (H2O) or other more complex ones such as glucose, also the alpha helix of DNA (DNA), Buckyballs (spheres made with carbon atoms) or even carbon nanotubes. From the range 10-8.2 to 10-7 we find everything from a cell membrane (made up of phospholipids) to the smallest thing seen in a microscope, including the complete DNA chain, the Gate transistor, and a diverse variety of viruses such as the circovirus. swine, hepatitis B or HIV AIDS, we also find ultraviolet waves, which are close to the visible range in the electromagnetic spectrum.