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I’ve been learning about Space tonight. Not space, but Space. Everything is so far away . How about The Sun, that bright yellow thing in the sky, not that sack of shit that masquerades as a newspaper? It’s fucking huge and it’s miles away. Here’s what the internet says:
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- Location: The Sun is the star at the center of our solar system, about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth. It’s part of the Milky Way Galaxy, in its outer regions.
- Composition: The Sun is a massive ball of plasma, made up of hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen makes up about 74% of its mass, while helium makes up about 24%. The remaining few percent is made up of heavier elements like oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.
- Size: The Sun’s radius is 695,700 kilometers, and its equator circumference is 4,379,000 kilometers.
- Temperature: The Sun’s temperature ranges from 5,973°C to 15,000,000°C
- Rotation: The Sun rotates on its axis once every 27 Earth days.
- Orbit: The Sun orbits the Milky Way at an average speed of 720,000 kilometers per hour (200 kilometers per second).
- Age: The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old.
- Future: In about 5 billion years, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and enter the red giant phase of its life. During this phase, the Sun will get bigger and cooler.
Oh shit. So this means, then, that if I live for another 5 billion years I could be in more than a little bother. The good news is that 5 billion is stretching things a bit for me and if I make another 15, I will break a few family longevity records. But still, these facts and figures, they’re amazing. But what could be further away than The Sun? 93 million miles is a fair distance. Can you imagine a return ticket with First Great Western to The Sun? Even with my old codger discount, I’d struggle with this one. But, it turns out, in astronomical terms, The Sun is just round the corner.
For those of us who grew up thinking that Milky Way and Galaxy were merely chocolate bars, the sheer size of space and time is far too much to take in. I remember as a small boy watching the moon landings on our tiny crackling black and white television and wondering how on Earth a space craft could fly so far away, to the distant extremes of space. But it turns out that the moon – and what an original name for a moon that is – is only about 239,000 miles away, which is only 25 times longer than the longest commercial flight in our world (JFK to Singapore if you must know, 9537 miles). I mean, that’s a bloody long way until you consider the Milky Way.
Even the wikipedia explanation of the Milky Way leaves me utterly bamboozled. “The Milky Way[c] is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy’s appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.” The first bit I get, but what about this? “The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a D25 isophotal diameter estimated at 26.8 ±. 1.1kiloparsecs (87,400 ± 3,600 light-years),[10] but only about 1,000 light-years thick at the spiral arms (more at the bulge).” Hmm. I’ll nod politely there. Yet that’s the easy bit.
I have tried to work out how far we are from the Milky Way and, from what I can gather, it is something like 26,000 light years. The Milky Way, I learn, is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km (about 100,000 light years or about 30 kpc) across. This is not rocket science. It is much more complicated than that.
All of which is to show just how insignificant we are on this small planet hurtling through space, small areas of which are able to support life. We think we are unique and incredible and maybe we are, since there are no obvious signs of life in nearby space. This would be a good time, I suspect, to attribute everything to God’s grand design, that the sheer majesty of everything was all down to Him and how he did it is not for us to know. I’ll say this though. He must be extremely busy dealing with all these black holes and imploding galaxies. Praising God and his “mysterious ways” is a darn sight easier than trying to work it all out myself. Perhaps there are some things we are not meant to know? Or I’m just too thick?
I am in way over my head in this blog that starts pretty well nowhere and ends nowhere. So many times I have started a blog, got bogged down in detail that I didn’t understand and then abandoned it. I should have this time, I am sure you will agree, but in trying to make sense of it all and failing hopelessly is quite probably not unique to be alone.
We have a large telescope upstairs and I reckon it’s time I gazed at the night time skies to see what’s out there. Or alternatively, I’ll go to Tesco and buy a few bars of Milky Way and Galaxy. That would be easier to understand than what the hell is going on in space.
