This is astronomy 101 and I apologize to those with even a passing familiarity of this topic.Pictured above is the Andromeda Galaxy which is the closest galaxy to our own, the Milky Way. Current best estimates suggest that Andromeda contains one trillion stars, several times more than the 200-400 billion which the Milky Way is estimated to contain. Andromeda is approximately 2,500,000 light years away and a single light year measures just under 10 trillion kilometres.
Now, here is what should really blow your mind: there are probably more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
In case any Bibleist thinks that our planet is somehow special, they should heed the words of Stephen Hawking: "The large-scale homogeneity of the universe makes it very difficult to believe that the structure of the universe is determined by anything so peripheral as some complicated molecular structure on a minor planet orbiting a very average star in the outer suburbs of a fairly typical galaxy."
1 comments:
And we wonder why life on other planets has not visited us here on Earth. Would you?
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