The Universe is so large it's hard for us to get our minds around and understand just how big it really is.
Scientists calculate the Universe to be about 14 Billion years old and about 46 Billion light-years across.
If you know what a light-year is don't try to translate into miles or kilometers, it's just too big a number.
In case you don't know what a light-year is, it's how far light can travel in a year, and that's a very big number also.
In this article I'm going to try to give some relationships that will help you appreciate just how big the Universe really is.
Let me go back to the concept of a light-year.
When you talk about really large distances like what you incur in the cosmos rather than talk in miles scientists talk in terms of light-years.
As I mentioned above that is how far light can travel in a time span of one year.
Now light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, (not an hour, but a second).
So you're probably starting to get the picture that we are talking about big numbers and big distances.
Just so you can see what it looks like if we translate the speed of light into miles per hour that we are more familiar with its 669,600,6000 miles per hour.
That's moving along at a pretty good clip.
Just so you don't miss this point we are talking almost 700 Million miles per hour.
OK, so we've got a feeling now for the speed of light.
Those are very fast moving rascals, those little beams of light zipping through space.
Compared to the speed of sound its way faster.
That's why when peoples used to time a 100 yard dash with a stop watch they would hit the button at the sight of the flash made by the starter gun not the sound of the gun to get an accurate time for the race.
Since they were 100 yards away the sound took too long to get to them vs.
the light created by the flash which is traveling at 186,000 miles per second.
OK, so light is pretty fast and the distance it can go in one year therefore is a long way.
Let me create one more image in your mind to help make this clearer.
The circumference of the Earth is about 25,000 miles (rounded off).
That means that at the speed of light you can travel around the Earth about 8 times in a second (rounded off).
OK, I hope that is starting to give you an idea of the speed I'm talking about when you can go completely around the planet 8 times in one second.
So given a whole year of time, light can go a really long distance.
In fact to see another number that is too big to really understand if we translate a light year, which is a distance, not a measure of time, Light can go 5,865,696,000,000 miles in a year.
I think that's about 6 Trillion rounded off, still a little hard to understand if we try to make the final calculation to get the size of the universe in miles.
It just gets too big to understand.
So let me try to make one more analogy here to try to make it something you can get begin to comprehend.
The Milky Way is the Galaxy that the Earth is in.
The Milky Way is about 200,000 light years across.
That's a distance remember, not a unit of time.
So if light can travel 8 times around the planet in one second and the Galaxy is 200,000 light years across how long does it take for light to travel from one end of the Galaxy to the other? If a light was turned on at one end of the Galaxy when Christ was born about 2000 years ago, it means that the light beam has only traveled about 1% across the width of the Galaxy.
EIGHT times around the earth in one second, but only 1 % across the Galaxy in 20 Centuries.
And there are Billions of Galaxies in the Universe and they are Billions of times their size apart from each other and the Universe is what all those very large marbles are in.
Do you get a feel now for what kind of size we are talking about? Can you appreciate the size of the Universe? Is your mouth hanging open? I hope nobody is looking at you.
Scientists calculate the Universe to be about 14 Billion years old and about 46 Billion light-years across.
If you know what a light-year is don't try to translate into miles or kilometers, it's just too big a number.
In case you don't know what a light-year is, it's how far light can travel in a year, and that's a very big number also.
In this article I'm going to try to give some relationships that will help you appreciate just how big the Universe really is.
Let me go back to the concept of a light-year.
When you talk about really large distances like what you incur in the cosmos rather than talk in miles scientists talk in terms of light-years.
As I mentioned above that is how far light can travel in a time span of one year.
Now light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, (not an hour, but a second).
So you're probably starting to get the picture that we are talking about big numbers and big distances.
Just so you can see what it looks like if we translate the speed of light into miles per hour that we are more familiar with its 669,600,6000 miles per hour.
That's moving along at a pretty good clip.
Just so you don't miss this point we are talking almost 700 Million miles per hour.
OK, so we've got a feeling now for the speed of light.
Those are very fast moving rascals, those little beams of light zipping through space.
Compared to the speed of sound its way faster.
That's why when peoples used to time a 100 yard dash with a stop watch they would hit the button at the sight of the flash made by the starter gun not the sound of the gun to get an accurate time for the race.
Since they were 100 yards away the sound took too long to get to them vs.
the light created by the flash which is traveling at 186,000 miles per second.
OK, so light is pretty fast and the distance it can go in one year therefore is a long way.
Let me create one more image in your mind to help make this clearer.
The circumference of the Earth is about 25,000 miles (rounded off).
That means that at the speed of light you can travel around the Earth about 8 times in a second (rounded off).
OK, I hope that is starting to give you an idea of the speed I'm talking about when you can go completely around the planet 8 times in one second.
So given a whole year of time, light can go a really long distance.
In fact to see another number that is too big to really understand if we translate a light year, which is a distance, not a measure of time, Light can go 5,865,696,000,000 miles in a year.
I think that's about 6 Trillion rounded off, still a little hard to understand if we try to make the final calculation to get the size of the universe in miles.
It just gets too big to understand.
So let me try to make one more analogy here to try to make it something you can get begin to comprehend.
The Milky Way is the Galaxy that the Earth is in.
The Milky Way is about 200,000 light years across.
That's a distance remember, not a unit of time.
So if light can travel 8 times around the planet in one second and the Galaxy is 200,000 light years across how long does it take for light to travel from one end of the Galaxy to the other? If a light was turned on at one end of the Galaxy when Christ was born about 2000 years ago, it means that the light beam has only traveled about 1% across the width of the Galaxy.
EIGHT times around the earth in one second, but only 1 % across the Galaxy in 20 Centuries.
And there are Billions of Galaxies in the Universe and they are Billions of times their size apart from each other and the Universe is what all those very large marbles are in.
Do you get a feel now for what kind of size we are talking about? Can you appreciate the size of the Universe? Is your mouth hanging open? I hope nobody is looking at you.
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