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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
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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