Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.
—Luke 21:26
2200 Size of Universe
We learn from the astronomers that the Milky Way, the disc-shaped galaxy to which our sun belongs, is a family of more than 100 billion stars. And these scientists say there may be as many as 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And they believe that the billions of these galaxies’ billion stars may have hundreds of millions of planets like our earth. God’s creation from a one-sentence command!
2201 No Scale Model Of Universe
Anything may be reproduced on scale model except the universe. The impossibility of making such a model accurately is shown by the fact that, if the earth were represented by a ball only one inch in diameter, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would have to be placed nearly 51,000 miles away.
2202 Compared With Thickness Of Page
Imagine that the thickness of this page which you are reading is the distance from earth to sun (93 million miles). The distance to the nearest star (4½ light years) would be a 71-feet high shelf of paper. And the diameter of our own galaxy (100,000 light years) is a 310-mile stack of paper, while the edge of the known universe is a pile of paper one-third of the way to the sun (31 million miles).
2203 Like A Drop In Ocean
A man looking up at the sky on a clear night sees as much of the universe as a protozoan might see of the ocean in which it drifts. The moon, the planets, and the few thousand stars which are visible to him are as a single drop of water in the boundless sea of the universe.
2204 Comparison From Hollowed Sun
The sun is so large that, if it were hollow, it could contain more than one million worlds the size of our earth. There are stars in space so large that they could easily hold 500 million suns the size of ours. There are about 100 billion stars in the average galaxy. And there are at least 100 million galaxies in the known universe.
2205 How Big Is 100 Billion?
But how many are 100 billion? If we were to count 250 a minute—day and night—it would take us about 1,000 years to count to 100 billion. Multiply this by a few trillion, the probable number of galaxies, and perhaps we have a better understanding of Christ’s words: “All power is given unto me.”
2206 Distance To Nearest Galaxy
The distance from our galaxy to the next nearest one is nearly 1,500,000 light years. That is the distance light will travel in one-and-a-half million years going 186,000 miles each second.
This distance is so great that if every man, woman and child in the United States had a library of 65,000 volumes, and we collect every book in all these libraries, and then started on this journey of 1,500,000 light years, and decided to place one letter from one of the books on each mile (thus, if “The” was the first word in the first book, we would put “T” on the first mile, “h” on the second mile, and “e” on the third mile; then leave a mile blank without a letter and start the next word in the same manner, etc. ), before we complete the journey, we will use up every letter in every book of every one of the libraries and have to call for more. And that is only the distance to our nearest galaxy.
The total known universe is about 8 to 10 billion light years long.
—Selected
2207 Facts About Our Neighbors
Outside the earth’s planetary system, the nearest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.25 light years.
The most distant body that can be seen with the naked eye from earth is the Great Spiral Galaxy in the star cluster or constellation known as Andromeda—more than 2 million light years away. It appears only as a faint blotch of light.
The largest star visible to the naked eye is probably Alpha Plerculis, a red giant—the name given to stars that are cooling.
By the standards of earth’s solar system, the largest stars are enormous. The variable star VV Cephei, at 1000 million miles in diameter, for example, is 1220 times the size of the sun. (A variable star is a pulsating star, growing bright, then dim, in a regular pattern or rhythm. )
The most densely populated area of the heavens is considered to be that part of the Milky Way, or earth’s galaxy, in the constellation, or star cluster, known as Cygnus, the swan.
—Selected
2208 Universe May Be Even Larger
The complex 4,400 pound OAO-2 (Orbiting Astronomical Observatory) spacecraft, which is in orbit some 480 miles above the earth, is well beyond the obscuring effects of the atmosphere. After studying observations made in the first year of orbiting OAO-2, astronomers are concluding that “the universe may be several times larger than previously believed.” This amazing instrument, ranking in importance with the invention of the telescope, can study stars and celestial objects hidden from earth-based instruments.
—Prairie Overcomer
2209 Radio Astronomers
In astronomy now, the best results are achieved by those who listen rather than look! The listeners are radio astronomers, whose vast antennas scan the skies for squawks, beeps and hums that tell them more about the universe than the eye can see.
Now radio astronomers are getting a movable telescope that is bigger and more precise than any before. It is a huge 326 feet paraboloid nestle in West Germany’s Eifel hills at Effelsberg, south of Bonn. More than 75 feet larger than the existing record holder, Britain’s big Jodrell Bank radio antenna.
—Time
2210 Explosion In The Skies
The Palomar Observatory in California has taken a photograph and has published an account, of an explosion that took place in the heart of a galaxy of stars which is presently cutting a swath 60 billion miles wide and is moving forward at the rate of 20 million miles an hour.
—The King Is Coming
2211 Most Distant Galaxy Discovered
Berkeley, Calif (UPI)—The discovery of a galaxy that is eight billion light years away and is five or ten times larger than the Milky Way was announced by University of California astronomers.
The newly discovered object in space, which contains hundreds of billions of stars, is the most distant part of the universe yet photographed. The only things which may be farther out are the quasars which so far are no more than mysterious sources of radiation, the astronomers said.
The galaxy, because of its great distance, is only one-millionth the brightness it would take to be seen by the naked eye.
Its discovery stretches the distance of observed galaxies by three billion light years away from the earth. Previously the most distant one, photographed in 1960 at Mt. Palomar, was five billion light years away.
2212 Big Hole Up North
One of the most inspiring and thrilling of recent disclosures of astronomers is that there is a great empty space in the north in the nebula of the constellation of Orion—a heavenly cavern so gigantic that the mind of man cannot comprehend it and so brilliantly beautiful that words cannot adequately describe it.
All astronomers agree there is a huge opening in Orion which is perhaps more than 16,740,000,000,000 miles in diameter. The diameter of the earth’s orbit is 186,000,000 miles, which in itself is incomprehensible to man. Yet the opening into this heavenly cavern of Orion is 90,000 times as wide. In other words, there could be 30,000 solar systems like ours with a sun in the middle of each, across the entrance of the opening in the north, and still have room to spare.
—The Bible Friend
2213 “Now, We Are Small Enough”
William Beebe was no armchair scholar. His extensive knowledge of nature was gained from explorations into the jungles of Asia and South America, and to the bottom of the ocean in the world’s first bathysphere.
Beebe had much in common with his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who also loved nature and exploring. Often after a visit at Sagamore Hill, Beebe recalled, he and the President went outdoors to see who could first locate the Andromeda galaxy in the constellation of Pegasus. Then, gazing at the tiny smudge of distant starlight, Beebe or Roosevelt would say:
“That is the spiral galaxy of Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It is 750,000 light-years away. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each one larger than our sun.”
After that thought had sunk in, Roosevelt used to flash his famous toothy grin: “Now I think we are small enough.” And the two men would retire, put in their place by the limitless universe.
—Selected
2214 Epigram On Heavenly Phenomenon
• Anybody who still thinks the sky is the limit has no imagination.
—Saturday Evening Post
See also: Signs and Wonders ; Stars ; Unidentified Flying Objects .