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The Big Questions From the beginning of mankind’s consciousness, we have gazed at the stars and wondered what our place is, why we are here, who we are. Are we alone? What is our place in the grand scheme of things? How small or how big are we? We must also look at the size and distance between things in our little solar system. The nearest object to the Earth is the moon. While the moon appears quite close it is actually 238,900 miles from the Earth and takes our fastest spacecraft three days to reach. The closest planet to Earth is (depending on the time of year) at the closest 38 million kilometers. Our solar system is roughly 2.8 billion kilometers or 5.6 billion miles across.. First things first •Earth is the third of eight planets from our star, the Sun. •Only three of said planets are smaller than Earth •The largest body in our solar system is, of course, the Sun, into which Earth could fit one million times. •This is just to help put things into perspective…. If that seems huge… Then check this out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWN s4QrshY Lets talk about light A Light Year A light year is not a measure of time but of distance. According to Carl Sagan in Cosmos, a light year (being the distance that light travels in one year) is about ten trillion kilometers .To try and put that into perspective, our sun is 93 million miles away and it takes light six to seven minutes to reach Earth. The Milky Way galaxy is our home and in a sense of the word, our neighborhood although it is a neighborhood that we cannot even possibly imagine getting to know intimately. It is far too immense. Our galaxy spans about 100,000 light years across. We remember that a light year is roughly ten trillion miles. So multiply 100,000 by ten trillion and you get how many miles you would have to travel to get from one side of the Milky Way to the other. The Milky Way is also relatively small compared to other galaxies although from our little planet to the center of our galaxy it would take 30,000 years going to speed of light to reach. To help us better understand or try to grasp some of these big distances and numbers, we turn again to Carl Sagan. He says “When we talk about infinity we are talking about a quantity greater than any number, no matter how large. The American mathematician Edward Kasner once asked his nine year old nephew to invent a name for an extremely large number- ten to the power one hundred or ten followed by one hundred zeroes. The boy called it googol. If a googol seems large, consider a googolplex. It is ten to the power of a googol. That is a ten followed by a googol zeroes. These numbers, the googol and the googolplex, do not approach, they come no where near, the idea of infinity. A googolplex is precisely as far away from infinity as the number one.” Cosmos To Infinity and Beyond . Our closest neighbor in galaxies is Andromeda which is 2,538,000 light years distant. Let us remember that is not miles, that is light years. So take 2,538,000 times ten trillion and you get the amount of miles. This distance in space, while a number we cannot possibly fathom, is minuscule. The furthest objects in space are the objects at the farthest reaches of the known universe, some 13 billion light years away (Observable Universe). They are so far that we are viewing them now as they were before the Earth was formed because it has taken the light from them that long just to reach us. While we may like to pretend we understand these distances, the numbers are too large for the human mind to comprehend. Here is a little bit of comfort. Video recommendation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NU2t5zlxQQ Feeling Stressed? Just remember… Work Cited • • • • Works Cited Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980. Sagan, Carl. Billions and Billions. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997. Cain, Fraser. How Big is the Solar System? Universe Today. September 3, 2013. Web. October 28, 2013. http://www.universetoday.com/104486/ • How the Universe Works. Star Size Comparison. YouTube November 6, 2011. Accessed October 27, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWNs4QrshY • How Big is the Universe? Minutephysics. YouTube. February 25, 2013. Accessed October 25, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NU2t5zlxQQ