Tag Archives: galaxy

Inconceivably vast

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Webb’s First Deep Field is the first operational image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The deep-field photograph, which covers a tiny area of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is centered on SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans. Thousands of galaxies are visible in the image, some as old as 13 billion years.The image is the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken. Captured by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the image was revealed to the public by NASA on 11 July 2022. (Wikipedia)

It’s too hard to fathom just how big the universe is. The image below only shows a few stars, they are the bright spots with 6 flares coming off of them… a by-product of the James Webb telescope’s design. The rest of the bright spots are galaxies. Galaxies that each hold billions or trillions of stars.

And if you held your pinky up to the night sky you would completely cover the area of the sky that this photo covers with a sliver of a finger nail.

We are so insignificantly tiny, and our Milky Way galaxy is so insignificantly placed in the universe. We just can’t conceive of just how inconceivably vast our universe is, and how insignificantly tiny our solar system is.

It’s too much to comprehend. And yet, here we are. So significant to each other, so connected to our planet. We get to live lives rich in mystery and wonder.

What other life is out there, or was out there, some time in the 13 billion years of our universe’s existence? Could alien life comprehend our existence? We’ll probably never know.

If there was life in one of these distant galaxies right now, we wouldn’t it know for millions or billions of years. The light we see in that photo above are from the past. To put it into perspective, if they were looking at light from our planet, they would be seeing light emitted from before dinosaurs roamed the earth… in other words they would be looking at prehistoric life on a planet with single cell organisms or perhaps no life at all… yet.

It’s too hard to grasp. It’s inconceivable.

How long is a year? It’s all relative

We recently celebrated my wife’s birthday, and it made me think about what that meant in our solar system: One year means that our earth has circled the sun and is in the *same* position that it was a year ago. What that really means is the same position relative only to the sun.

Not only is every other planet in a different position than the year before, but the sun itself isn’t anywhere near where it used to be.

Watch this video: Skylight: How Does Our Solar System Move Around the Milky Way?

“As our spinning planet revolves around the sun, we’re also speeding through the galaxy at 230 kilometres per second.”

So, while here on earth we are in the same relative position to the sun that we were a year ago, the sun itself has travelled:

230km/second x 60 seconds in a minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 365 days in a year: The sun and earth are approximately 7,253,280,000 Kilometres away from where they were a year ago. We are quite literally only in the same place we were a year ago relative to the position of the sun.

Happy birthday = Happy single rotation around the sun… while the sun is racing through the galaxy, taking us 7+ billion kilometres away from where we we a year ago!

Oh, and by the way, this just factors in the way our sun moves within the galaxy. Our galaxy is also moving through the universe… all this movement is relative.

As a final thought on the relative length of a year, a year of fighting cancer is significantly different than a year of sabbatical on a tropical island… no matter how far we may travel through the cosmos in that time.

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This video shows us the actual travel path of the sun and planets through the galaxy: The helical model – our solar system is a vortex