Did I mention space is big
Really big...
Did you know that the typical separation between stars in the neighbourhood is many millions of time the typical size of a star and about ten thousand times larger than the typical size of the planetary systems.
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and about ten thousand times larger than the typical size of the planetary systems.
Yep, the cosmos is HUGE! Something really cool is that once you work to expand your mind to try to understand it, then you can turn right around and shrink by the same orders of magnitude to understand the really small aspects of creation!
Dave Briggs :~)
One thing I ask my students to do in Astro 10 (scary concept for introductory Astro, but no one has died in the attempt yet) is to calculate the filling factor of a typical globular cluster.
It is pretty amazing when you see a picture of M13 and the stars look to be right on top of each other to find out that the cluster is basically empty space. If you assume 500,000 solar radius stars distributed uniformly in a sphere ~10 pc in radius, the stars fill about 10^-20 of the volume of the cluster.