That’s a really big number…800 Trillion…but what does it represent? No, it’s not the national debt and no it’s not the amount that Wall Street firms will be giving out in bonuses this year.
Instead, it’s the total mass (in Suns) of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that resides about 7 billion light years (another really big number) from us. A galaxy cluster is just that, a group of galaxies that are gravitationally bound together. So that number represents an amount of mass equivalent of 800 trillion of our Suns in that cluster of galaxies.
But how much mass is that? And how do we put a number like that into perspective? It’s just too big to comprehend. So let’s break it down.