- Caption: Larisa’s class visits the museum of natural history.
- Sign: Giant redwood
- Sign: Argentinosaurus
- Sign: The Sun
- Sign: NML Cygni – The largest known star
- Larisa: Midget!
- Man: ?
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![[0455] Size Matters](/comics/2013-02-14-0455-size-matters.png "[0455] Size Matters")
[0455] Size Matters
└ posted on Thursday, 14 February 2013, by Novil
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Correction to the title: Larisa wanders away from her class to visit the Museum of Natural History.
NML Cygni: Larisa learns how big a fire can be, setting a new goal for her next live and life art event.
I admit when I saw the first panel (Larissa and the giant redwood) I was expecting her to set it on fire.
Also if that guy is a midget, what is Larissa? a fire fairy?
Why did she call that man a midget? Because he was like a SUN to her. 😛
illeatyourself wrote:
That comment sucked because I screwed it up. It only makes sense if you think about exactly how crazy Larisa is. It wouldn’t surprise me if she let him stay the night at her house at some point (perhaps his car broke down and she happened to overhear that he had nowhere to stay) and started thinking of him as a son. XD
illeatyourself wrote:
The was horribly executed, I know I say it often as a joke, but this time I really want you to sit in the corner.
Wait until she finds the displays on the great extinctions. Or the Hadean Period. Or the life cycle of our sun…
Presentation Audio: …as levels of helium fusion increase, the Sun will become progressively hotter, eventually swelling up into a red giant. But long before that, the entire world will burn.
Larisa: Ooooh! *applauds*
wow…and I thought that ‘Canis Majoris” was the biggest one…I must be very outdated about this….well…I also lost my care about this when I was younger =/
Those bastards! They shrunk the sun!
@ Egomane:
Here’s to hoping she never discovers quasars.
@ Deko:
I had thought so too, but a quick check of Wikipedia shows that Canis Majoris has more recently been calculated to be not as big as originally thought. Still, pretty darn big though. 🙂
Oh, come on. That’s completely disproportionate, and really doesn’t do a good job representing size.
NML Cygni would be at least a hundred times bigger than that.
When are we going to see Larissa set fire to something again. I like it web she’s being a little pyromaniac.
I thought the largest star was VY Canis Majoris (diameter is larger than the orbit of Jupiter)
Her face in the last panel. XD
Heh heh, I was just going over star types with my daughter, I will have to show her this comic!
Why realise how tiny and insignificant you are, when you can realise how tiny and insignificant other people are?!
an crap an O class hypergiant… how many of them are there in known universe? 12?
illeatyourself wrote:
Perhaps because he’s some variety of “star” (not that I consider sports figures to be “stars.” If your only talent is throwing a ball around, you need to work on it…)
@ The J.A.M.:
Not anymore. With newer and better space telescope we found more and more bigger stars.
I have this feeling that Nml Cygni is not the biggest, there’s a much much bigger stars out there.
AckAckAck wrote:
IT is the largest we know now… and well O class hypergiants are very short lived (thus incredibly rare) Milky way is too old a galaxy to sport many of them, and we can´t wery well see into other galaxies.
Plus most of out galaxy stars are BLOCKED from our wiev by matter, nebulae, and other stars. It is likely that galactic core black-hole event horizonts have larger diameter than O class hypergiants and red supergiants… but that is not actualy star-size per say…
But generaly there is no bigger shining fiery object than O class hypergiants (Somewhats put ancient technology in Stargate into perspective since 50 million years old ship managed to bathe in one and escape)
Well technicaly the gamma ray burst cones detected over and under out galaxy disc emanating from centre may indicate something more powerfull… generaly given power required if emanating from single source it would take energy of supermassive black hole to vaporize in an instant… (we likely aren´t dead thanks to fact that the way between core and us is so crowded with stars dust and whatver, that no ray managed to get this far into the rim.
@ Paeris Kiran:
And well it had to happen billion years ago anyway 🙂
oh we are so small.. and iti s nothing with the size of a galaxy or a galaxy cluster.
Btw shouldn´t Landon be around? this may be his area of expertise 😀
Fith grade flash back…
I looked at a poster of our solar system that showed the planet’s size comparisons to the sun. I pointed to the sun and said “I thought it was bigger than that?” The class thought I ment the sun was the actual same size as in the poster. Where I ment in comparison to the other planets in that poster.
Oh, that turned out to be a fun day…
Holy fucking shit on a pogo stick! We got such large stars??? O_O
That thing is like, i don´t like we need a new word to describe how big it is!!! D8
@ AmadeusMop: Clearly, the museum made the scale based on an old star, and was only left with enough budget to update the sign 🙂
Yeah… On that scale (of NML Cygni, I mean), Sol would actually be less than a pixel in size. If that. On a 6-foot depiction of VW Cephei, Sol isn’t even visible.
@ The J.A.M.:
Nah, VY Canis Majoris used to be the largest known star, but now it’s NML Cygni. I had the same thought, but I looked it up.
@ Corvo:
Small and insignificant? Hmm… that reminds me of something…
So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth.
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on earth!
(Eric Idle, Galaxy Song, from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life)
Is there intelligent life out in space? Of course there is. It hasn’t contacted US!
That’s actually a pretty small redwood. It must be a slice from near the top.
@ Marscaleb:
actually, it is a perspective picture, she is probably standing a good 20 ft away from it due to a fire hazzard warning placed by museum employees and a glass casing to prevent larissa from turning it into a giant camp fire. she probably did that on an earlier visit which is why the warning sign was made and the case was put up to prevent her from doing it again.
Hehe largest known star. Next up on Entertainment Tonight….
There’s nothing like looking at some of the world’s giants to make your whole species feel small.
But being small has its advantages too.
@ Erika Hammerschmidt:
On the other hand, compared to the vast majority of the life on this planet, humans are ridiculously big. Wonder what she’ll call that guy after she looks at a few roomfuls of insects and bacteria…
My reaction to seeing the giant star would have been ‘Imagine what we could do if we could harness even a FRACTION of that POWER! We could SOLVE ENERGY… Problems.’
@ Marscaleb:
Actually, putting it that way makes it sound like it’s small for ANY type of redwood, which is untrue. There are plenty of redwoods that are smaller than that.
Aerion Snowpaw wrote:
You do realize that radius about 5 lightyears around O class hypergiant would kill you just by few seconds of exposure to it´s radiation do you?
(to much in UV and soft Xray…), for what it is worth pulsars pack even more energy and are more deadly… albeit mostly in cone areas on their rotation axis.
Our sun has enough energy for few billion years and we can´t tap really into that… (the fotovoltaic energy is a sad joke (and forever will be unless our theory of termodynamics isn´t substantialy wrong… and well it wasn´t refuted for a century… and well if Cavendish published his work it would not be refuted for century and half)
@ Marscaleb:
Agree, that redwood is just a baby. Maybe this happens back east where they don’t actually understand there is stuff bigger than them.
Testing…
Ok, it worked.
*puts nerd glasses on*
Ha! That diagram is so inaccurate that NML CYGNI could be replaced with VY CANIS MAJORIS and the star representing the sun would still be to big, hahaha *snort*
Neospector wrote:
Just for the record… absolutely everything “illeatyourself” ever posts is utterly horrible (most of it just consists of excited shrieking), yet it usually manages to get quite a few up-votes. I’m not sure how nor why that happens, but I strongly suspect bribery…
… Either that or people will upvote anything that sounds “positive”, no matter how vapid and poorly executed it may be. In counterpoint, they will downvote just about anything “negative” in equal measure… which is unfortunate for me as I have a policy of only commenting to correct, criticise or extrapolate (very rarely I try to “just agree”, but it always sounds forced and a bit off).
Anyhow… that is probably the last I’ll say on the matter. A 99.9% success rate at keeping my mouth shut about that profligate’s verbal vomit is still pretty good.
AmadeusMop wrote:
~17 times, actually, which you’d know if you bothered to do the maths rather than guessing.
So.
Most people can fit in any room in a house, provided the room isn’t too occupied. A house, possibly in a city, definitely in a country, on one of the smaller planets in the solar system (compared to the gas giants), orbiting around a star that’s not all that big when you take other stars into account, in a single arm of a single galaxy of the many out there.