The Sombrero Galaxy by Hubble
The Sombrero Galaxy by Hubble
There are approx. 200 to 400
billion stars in the Milky Way. Now look at this galaxy. It has 200 to
300 billion stars. Now there are billions of galaxies with billions of
stars and that is just what we can observe with the current technology.
A billion billion is a Quintilian and there is about 400 billion x a Quintilian stars in the known universe. Something to the power of 10 to
the 24th.
It blows my mind! What gets me isn’t just the number of
stars, and the enormous scale and size and distance. It’s the amount of
time and that each galaxy is 31 million light years away. The amount of
time it took for the light from that picture to reach us, entire species
could evolve on planets and develop into a space faring galactic
civilization; empires could rise and fall, then fade into dust, and be
lost in the sands of time, without us ever knowing. And that’s just the
31 million years it took for that light, which is a drop in the bucket
of time that this galaxy has had to create life over many many billions
of years.
Space vroom
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