How big is the
universe? Have you ever wondered about that? When you gaze up at the stars in
the night sky, do you ever think about the vastness of the world we live in?
Consider for a
moment some of the following astronomical facts. Disclaimer: If you’re not into
“mind-blowing” experiences, you may not want to read any further, but if you’re
up for some deep contemplation I believe you’ll find this as fascinating as I
do.
Let’s start with the
sun, at the center of our solar system. When we see the sun, we’re viewing an
object 93 million miles away. If you were able to book a flight to the sun, it
would take a commercial jet flying at 550 mph about 19 years to get you there.
I think that’s a non-stop flight. If you’d prefer to drive the interstellar
highway, at 60 mph you’d need 177 years to do it – not counting stops for
restrooms or fill-ups.
The sun is amazingly
huge. You thought Earth was large, with a diameter of 7,917.5 miles. Compare
that to the nearly 865,000 miles of the sun! You could line up 109 Earths
across the face of the sun. Another way of thinking about it is that if the sun
were the size of a beach ball, Earth would be the size of a pea, and you could
put a million of them inside.
But the sun is just
an average-sized star among the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy.
One of those stars is named Betelguese (yes, pronounced “Beetlejuice”), a red supergiant
some 700 times bigger than the sun and about 14,000 times brighter – or much
more. That star, by the way, is like the 9th brightest in our galaxy and is
part of the Orion constellation. If you see it while star-gazing, you’re
peering 640 light years into space.
That’s beyond my
capacity to understand, but one astronomer has noted that if the sun were the
size of a BB, the star Betelguese would be the size of a Toyota Camry and
located about 12,500 miles away.
Now, if you’re still
tracking and your mind’s not blown yet, let’s take another step. We haven’t
even begun to explore the reaches of our Milky Way galaxy, which stretches about
100,000 light years in diameter and bulges about 1,000 light years thick,
looking like a disc. The Milky Way contains some 100-400 billion stars, maybe
more. And most experts believe each star has at least one planet, which would
mean hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy, beyond the 8 or 9 (poor
Pluto!) in our solar system.
And here’s more just
to keep the wheels turning – our galaxy is only one of an estimated 100 billion
galaxies in our universe! Think about that for a while. I say, “Wow!”
I’m sharing all this
not to help you answer a couple of questions on Jeopardy!, but to join together
in singing the praises of the One who masterminded, purposed, and created all
things. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his
handiwork” (Psalm 19.1). What an amazingly mighty, glorious God we serve!
