Tag Archives: scale

So vast

Leave a reply

This morning I watched a video that explained that to get to the next galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, it would take 2.5 million years travelling at the speed of light. Imagine that, travelling 300,000km per second for millions of years. And then you’ve only reached the first of trillions of galaxies… Not billions, but trillions of galaxies in our universe.

It’s so hard to make sense of these numbers. I understand what they mean, but I can’t really comprehend the scale. For example, let’s break down the idea of traveling 300,000km in a second. That means travelling 18 million kilometres in a minute, or 1,080 million kilometres in an hour, or 1 billion & 920 million kilometres in one day.

And at that speed it would still take 2.5 million years to get to the next galaxy.

I understand what the numbers mean, I just struggle to fathom the scale in a way my brain can grasp beyond saying, ‘That’s really far,’ and ‘The universe is really, really big.’ No matter how much I cognitively try to grasp how ‘really big’ our universe is, I know that in reality it’s magnitudes bigger than I can comprehend. This is truly mind boggling.

Insignificantly small

I’ve been following updates from the James Webb Telescope and its fascinating to see how its expanding our knowledge of our universe. Recent news includes an “active supermassive black hole 10 million times the mass of the Sun”. (MSN)

To give this a different perspective on the physical size of this black hole. Our entire galaxy would fill less than 1% of this black hole. It’s hard to comprehend just how big this is. It boggles the mind to think of the scale of the universe. 500 years ago the work of Copernicus and Galileo helped change modern physics by defying the church and arguing that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, with our sun circling the earth. Now we can see the insignificance of our planet on the scale of the universe.

We are so insignificantly small. Furthermore, we know so little about our universe… and it’s exciting to know that new discoveries and theories are still being developed thanks to this telescope. We may not inhabit a significant part of the universe, but our knowledge of what’s beyond our galaxy is expanding. I find this exciting!

—-

Another fascinating point that boggles the mind with respect to the size of things in our universe: the radius of the star, UY Scuti is 1,700 times bigger than our sun. It would engulf Jupiter if it replaced our sun! (Source)