Grasping the Vastness of Our Universe

You are here

Grasping the Vastness of Our Universe

Login or Create an Account

With a UCG.org account you will be able to save items to read and study later!

Sign In | Sign Up

×

How vast is our universe? The distances in space are so great that we can only use the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) traveling for one whole year (a light year, about 5,879,000,000,000 miles) to measure them!

Robert Jastrow, a former head of NASA's Goddard Center, once used a clever comparison to help us grasp the immensity of the universe.

"An analogy," he says, "will help to clarify the meaning of these enormous distances. Let the sun be the size of an orange; on that scale of sizes the earth is a grain of sand circling in orbit around the sun at a distance of 30 feet; the giant planet Jupiter, 11 times larger than the earth, is a cherry pit revolving at a distance of . . . one city block; Saturn is another cherry pit two blocks from the sun; and Pluto, the outermost planet, is still another sand grain at a distance of ten city blocks from the sun.

"On the same scale the average distance between the stars is 2000 miles. The sun's nearest neighbor, a star called Alpha Centauri, is 1300 miles away. In the space between the sun and its neighbors there is nothing but a thin distribution of hydrogen atoms, forming a vacuum far better than any ever achieved on earth. The galaxy, on this scale, is a cluster of oranges separated by an average distance of 2000 miles, the entire cluster being 20 million miles in diameter.

"An orange, a few grains of sand some feet away, and then some cherry pits circling slowly around the orange at a distance of a city block. Two thousand miles away is another orange, perhaps with a few specks of planetary matter circling around it. That is the void of space" (Red Giants and White Dwarfs, 1990, p. 15). And this is nothing compared to the space between galaxies!

Yet to God, the entire universe is not that impressive. He says He stretches the entire heavens "like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in" (Isaiah 40:22). So as vast as the universe appears to be, it's not nearly as awesome as our great God, who created it for His own pleasure and purpose.

You might also be interested in...

Comments

  • Ivan Veller

    Hi Jeremy,

    This month, "Hubble astronomers...have identified six new galaxies of stars that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang itself. The study also updates a distance estimate for a seventh galaxy, placing it further back in time than any object previously identified...when the cosmos was less than 3% of its current age" (Jonathan Amos, 12 December 2012, Hubble Space Telescope achieves deepest cosmic view yet," BBC)!

    "Wrote the late Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and former professor of astronomy and geology at New York's Columbia University: 'Few astronomers could have anticipated that this event— the sudden birth of the Universe —would become a proven scientific fact, but observations of the heavens through telescopes have forced them into that conclusion' (The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe[)]" ("The Beginning of the Universe"): http://www.ucg.org/booklet/lifes-ultimate-question-does-god-exist/beginning-universe/

    "'I made the earth and created man on it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens'" (Isaiah 45:12a, ESV 2011).

  • KARS

    Long time ago I watched a show talking about this observatory and the use of the amazing telescope; that when it's used flatens the universe in order for them to see. Nasa launched Voyager many years ago and is long gone out of our solar system.

  • Jeremy Gibson

    Yesterday I watched a show that determined the universe is flat not cylindrical... That means that it is infinite. Amazing! Any input.

  • Join the conversation!

    Log in or register to post comments