Earth's Location in the Observable Universe

It is important to understand what is meant by the term 'observable universe' and to understand that because we are at the center of our 'observable universe', this does not mean that Earth is the center of the universe. The entire universe is likely much more vast and until we develop the technology to do so, we are unable to see beyond our observable universe, let alone the size of the universe at large.

The observable universe is theoretically the region of space that we are able to observe from Earth. The term 'observable' is not reliant on whether we have the technology right now to detect everything in our surrounding region of space - what it means is it is possible for light, or other signals, from spacial objects to reach Earth.

This image below is a cool flow diagram that illustrates the vastness of our observable universe. It's kind of hard to absorb exactly how large our observable universe is - when you look at the first five parts, you can wrap your head around the fact that there are however many galaxies in our Local Galactic Group. And then when looking at the Virgo Supercluster, it takes some time of staring to understand that each cluster is a handful of galaxies. But when I look at the Local Superclusters, that's where my brain starts to feel weird - the immense volume of it is not something our brain's are used to grasping. But nevertheless, I think this is a valuable diagram to help us understand how vast the universe we live in truly is.

Image Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin

I'm going to post up chopped up larger images of each segment of the diagram - so you can see it close up if you want and so that you can see it better in a horizontal fashion down the thread.