Macromarvels

Here are some examples of what Thomas Dubay calls "Macromarvels" ((from The Evidential Power of Beauty):

• The largest star thus far discovered is the super giant Betelgeuse ("close" to us at 310 light years), which has a diameter of 400 million miles, that is, about 500 times that of the sun.

• [Matter] is so bursting with potential that an ounce of anything at all, be it stick or stone, has energy enough to keep a 100-watt bulb burning for approximately 100 million years.

• "In the high temperatures of the sun, approximately 657 million tons of hydrogen are converted into 653 million tons of helium each second. The missing four million tons of mass are discharged as radiant energy. Such reactions are, quite literally, nuclear burning." To lose 4 million tons of its own substance every second of its existence would seem to suggest that the sun will vanish before long. No worry. "Over the next 6 billion years, this rate of use will cost the sun only one forty-thousandth of its enormous mass." - Science Digest, Nov 1982

• [P]ulsars, rotating collapsed neutron stars, are corpses of stars that were about double our sun in mass. As a result of undergoing a supernova explosion, their initially immense masses have shrunk to about six to twelve miles in diameter. We cannot, of course, imagine this incredible density. All of this is amazing enough, but we may add another aspect at which to marvel. Pulsars spin thirty and more times a second. Considering their immense density, to find that they could spin once in a second invites amazement.

• Neutron star: Originally the size and mass of our sun, this pulsar is now compacted to an average modern city, so that "a teaspoon of its matter would weigh a billion tons". - 365 Starry Nights, Chet Raymo