Our Universe
Why am I including this section in a religious / philosophical type book? It is not to make you feel insignificant, but to make you realise, that although we are part of this universe, it is only a very small part. To show you how arrogant and under what false impression we are to think that the whole universe was created just for us and that everything revolves around our desires and us.
Speed of Light
1,079,251,200 kilometre per hour
299,792,458 meter per second;
299,792 kilometre per second;
Light Year (LY)
Because of the vastness of our universe, the scientist had to come up with an alternative way of applying distances to it. They came up with Light Years, witch you can also break down into Light Minutes and Light Second if you apply the correct math. So what is a Light Year? A Light year is the distance a light particle travel in one year. What does that mean in non-technical language? Well, if we had the equipment to measure our galaxy, the Milky Way, in the conventional way we will find out that it is 9,454,240,512,000 km across! (9.4 Trillion Km)
Here are a few interesting distances
Distance from the earth to the moon = 394,514 KM
Distance from the sun to earth = 149,600,000 KM (149.6 million KM)
Distance from the sun to Pluto (radius of our solar system) = 5,903,000,000 KM (5.9 Billion KM)
Time travel
Something very interesting I figured out the first time I started getting interested in all of these figures is that the sunrise & sunset is not what it seams… It takes a particle of light 8.33 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. Therefore, the sun is not where you think it is in the sky. The moment you see it rise in the morning over the horizon, it has already been “up” for 8.33 minutes. If you see it disappear over the horizon in the evening, it has already “set” 8.33 minutes ago. The same applies for wherever it is in the sky. You see it where it has been 8.33 minutes ago.
If you look up at the sky at night, you are seeing the past! You see the stars, as they were hours or thousands and millions of years ago! This is because it takes so long for even light to reach us from stars that is very far away. The further you look the further you are looking back in time!
In a radius of 14 Billion LY’s we find the following:
- 10 Million Super Clusters
- 25 Billion galaxy groups
- 350 Billion large galaxies
- 3.5 Trillion dwarf galaxies
- 30 Billion Trillion stars
This exclude objects like planets, moons, asteroids, comets etc!
