You probably already know that the universe is a big place. Simply look up at night you are are able to see hundreds of thousands of stars gracing the sky. It is also easy to forget that most of the specs of light visible to us here on earth with the naked eye are stars from our own galaxy which is one of several galaxies that inhabit our tiny region of space.
The picture above was taken from the Chanda X-Ray Observatory. The image is a picture of the universe as it existed when it was just 2 billion years old, or nearly 11 billions years ago. This is one of the deepest, and therefore oldest, images of the universe ever imaged.
Lets now try to put this image in some sort of perspective. The stars you see at night are mostly part of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way consists of some 200 billion stars and is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter. Our nearest, large galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy which is about 2.5 million light years away from ours. It contains about 1 trillion stars and is also about 100,000 light years in diameter. Ok so now look at the picture above again and realize that each spec of light you see is an entire galaxy, the light of which has traveled 11 billion years to reach us.
If that doesn't blow you off your ass I'm not sure what will. For more information about this image, click here. Click the image for the super large version.
Sorry for the nerdy post. I will be back to shenanigans in the future.
1 comment:
I did the whole planetorium thing before and it's incredibly humbling to know how tiny (insignificant) we truly are. I like to think tiny, not insignificant, though. :)
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