When you think of the word infinity, you think of it as something that goes on forever. But what Im about to describe now is so big that it becomes impossible to continue understanding any further. And that would be our Universe.
It is so big that it is beyond human comprehension. We cant even comprehent 0.0000001% of it. What do I mean by comprehension? Simply that it stops making sense, also defying all laws of physics in the process. But Im going to try anyway.
The brightest thing visible to the naked eye in the night sky is a star called Sirius. It is twice as massive and 20 times as bright as our Sun. How about this - it is 85.14 trillion kilometers(85,140,000,000,000 km) away from Earth. That's huge. But in the context of the Universe its like a drop of water taken from the ocean. Now in our milky-way galaxy(a cluster of stars held together by gravity), there are over 100 billion stars and our sun is just one of them. As I've said above, the nearest star/sun is 85 trillion kilometres away from Earth; now imagine how big our Galaxy is. It's so big that you cant even begin to understand or put it into context.
Ok so thats our galaxy with 100 billion stars. Now the nearest galaxy to our own is called the Andromeda galaxy. It is 18.6 million trillion kilometers(18,600,000 trillion km) away and has twice as many stars as our own galaxy. Now thats huge, way beyond human comprehension.
Ok now Im going to stop here because my head is starting to hurt trying to understand all that. I have to, because the next fact makes the concept of infinity hard to contextualise also, because there are over 200 billion galaxies in the Universe. Now that is the ultimate. Only God can comprehend those distances and size.
And the most remarkable thing above all is that the universe started from a single point the size of an atom, known as The Big Bang - The moment of creation!
February 18, 2010 at 10:33pm
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