Updated: February 10, 2023 10:44
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Source: Chatnews
At school we may be taught about the solar system and its planets, but perhaps what is not taught at school is how big the universe itself is. This question often arises in a person when he is an adult because when he is an adult we have encountered a lot of changes in nature that make us ask ourselves how nature works so that we can live up to this point. Starting from ourselves, when compared to the human earth, it is very small in size, which is like humans being ants, so the size of the earth is equivalent to 127,420 football fields. Is this enough to amaze us? and it turns out that it is no more surprising when compared to the distance to the moon which if likened to a length of 3,844,000 football fields.
Then what about the planet mars, lots of rich people who plan to build colonies there like Elon Musk (Space X), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin). They think that the planet Mars has the possibility to become a new home for humanity in the future, but there are many challenges to realizing this plan because if it’s like taking a car to Mars at the speed of the highway, it will take us approximately 256 years or 8 generations. to get to mars. That’s just Mars, what happens if we want to go to the end of the solar system to Neptune. And if we take a car, it will take us 5022 years or so many generations to get to Neptune. Is your brain starting to get dizzy? Get ready this is just the beginning.
Penetrating beyond the solar system, we encounter “Voyager 1” a human object far away in outer space. Voyager is a tool used to record and retrieve objects in outer space and voyager travels at a speed of 61,500 km/hour. From a voyager’s point of view, the sun looks like a speck of star in the expanse of the universe, although a speck of the sun’s power can attract millions of comets and other celestial bodies to form a region called the “Oort Cloud”.
Historically voyager can get out of our solar system within 35 years (1977-2012), but to get out of the “Oort Cloud” voyager takes up to 30,000 years (Will arrive in 31,977). But the “Oort Cloud” is only one part of the area called “Local Interstellar Cloud” and in this area we no longer make sense using the “Kilometer” unit because it’s really crazy. We’ll be using a distance measure whose fancy name is light years. Even with a speed of over 1 billion km/h, light still takes 4 years to reach our nearest star “Alpha Centauri” and it takes 30 years to get from end to end. If we zoom out again we will meet our beloved galaxy, the Milky Way. In it there are more than 100 billion stars like the sun and 800 billion planets and other celestial bodies.
Seeing the size of our galaxy doesn’t stop us from being amazed here, because let’s take a breath because our galaxy is only 1 of 54 galaxies in the “Local Group”. And let’s sigh again, because the “Local Groub” itself is a very tiny part of the “Virgo Supercluster” in which there are more than 2000 galaxies like ours which are filled with stars and planets that have countless trillions of them. But as long as you are still reading this article, don’t ever stop sighing because the “Virgo Supercluster” itself is a small part of the “Laniakea Supercluster” in which there are more than 100,000 galaxies and have we reached the end? the answer is not yet, because our supercluster is a part that is not only tiny but is already like dust in the “Observable Universe” or the region of the universe that we can observe. Here is the home of 2 trillion galaxies which is the limit of our knowledge about the extent of the universe for now.
What we know now through physics, the universe outside of our observation is growing faster than the speed of light. Experts suspect that our universe is one of billions of other large universes (Multiverse) whose end has not been resolved to date. Therefore, seeing the vastness of the universe will make us more confident in the greatness of God’s power so that it can remind us that humans are just a speck of dust in the universe.
