What's the Biggest Thing in the Universe?! 📸

Original 2D space animation by Orbitimbre. Cosmic challenges, planet stories, and surprising endings. Join the Orbitimbre crew for custom emoji and loyalty badges: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtPoouzahVkQOs2gA206XRw/join Mercury is the family photographer, so he has never been in a single photo. Today he wants a picture of the biggest thing in the universe... and every time he backs up, something bigger photobombs the frame. Jupiter, the Sun, a fluffy red supergiant, a black hole that bends the picture, Grandpa Galaxy, the longest black hole jets ever seen, Laniakea, the Quipu wall, the cosmic web... until Mercury is lost in a giant void and finds the oldest light there is: the universe's baby picture. Stay to the end: scientists think everything we can see was once packed into a space smaller than Mercury. Chapters: 0:00 Everybody squeeze in 0:59 Photo 1: the planets 2:07 Photo 2: too bright 2:55 Photo 3: the fluffy giant 3:58 Photo 4: the photobomber 4:55 Photo 5: Grandpa Galaxy 5:46 The biggest things ever found 6:42 The great nothing 7:38 The universe's baby picture 8:54 Smallest in the middle Science notes: - Sizes are rounded. The trip is a cartoon: pictures are not to scale, and nothing could really fly this far. - Jupiter is about 11 Earths wide (over 1,300 Earths by volume). The Sun is about 109 Earths wide (over a million by volume). Counting its main rings, Saturn is almost twice as wide as Jupiter. - Mercury is the smallest planet, smaller than the moons Ganymede and Titan but more than twice as heavy as either. - Never look at the Sun, or point a camera at it, without a proper solar filter. - Stephenson 2-18 is one of the biggest known stars. One estimate puts it over 2,000 times wider than the Sun; other estimates are smaller, and the sizes of the biggest stars are still debated. On average, red supergiants are thousands of times thinner than air. - A black hole of about ten Suns is only about 60 km across. M87* (about 6.5 billion Suns) was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019; the donut in this video is a drawing, not the real image. - The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across with 100 billion stars or more; the Sun takes about 230 million years to go around it once. - Porphyrion (found 2024): black hole jets about 23 million light-years long. Laniakea (2014): our home supercluster, about 100,000 galaxies. Quipu (2025): about 1.3 billion light-years long; claims of even bigger walls are debated. - Most of space is inside the cosmic web's empty bubbles; the Boötes void is roughly 330 million light-years across. - The cosmic microwave background is light from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Its ripples (about 1 part in 100,000) were the seeds of galaxies. The map in this video is an illustration, not real sky data. - The observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. Running the standard Big Bang model backwards, scientists think everything we can see was once packed into a space smaller than Mercury. Astronomers predict that, very far in the future, faraway galaxies will drift out of sight. Music: "Pluckandplay" – Kwon (YouTube Audio Library) "Euphoria" – Dyalla (YouTube Audio Library) "Lands Unknown" – Futuremono (YouTube Audio Library) "Hall of the Mountain King" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 "Sneaky Snitch" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 "Gymnopedie No. 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Original score and sound effects: Orbitimbre (synthesized). Original Orbitimbre characters and animation (a scripted cartoon). #space #universe #astronomy