THE MIND BOGGLING UNIVERSE

THE MIND BOGGLING UNIVERSE

The galaxies move at 600 KM per Second. Rockets escaping the earth's gravitational pull move at 12 km/s. Thus galaxies move 50 times faster than the fastest vehicles invented by human beings. Just imagine the power required to move galaxies at this pace !

The universe has 10²² stars and may have 10¹⁶ planets. Thus many stars do not have planets. Only one in a million stars get a planet to love ! It is like a woman loving a man in a crowd. Do the (unlucky) no-planet stars feel jealous and explode in frustration and become supernova or black holes?!

A trillion (10¹²) or at least 10 billion (10¹⁰) possible planets like earth, may be there in the universe, which can support life.

The universe originated with a ‘Big Bang’ about 13.7 Billion to 14.7 Billion years back. Space and time were created in the Big Bang. Some theories suggest that our universe is part of an infinity of universes (called a multiverse) which are being continuously created. This is possible but very hard to prove.

We can imagine galaxies are like balls sitting on a rubber sheet (or colour spots in the surface of a gigantic balloon) which represents space. If we stretch the sheet, the balls move apart. Balls which are close together will only move apart slowly. Balls which are widely separated will seem to move apart very quickly.

People living on any one of the balls will see their own ball as stationary. They will see nearby balls moving away slowly and they will see distant balls moving away quickly. Very distant balls (beyond the horizon) can be moving away faster than the speed of light, but the people cannot see them - locally in their own part of the universe nothing is travelling faster than the speed of light.

At the beginning of the universe, the space was completely filled with matter. The matter was originally very hot and very dense and then expanded and cooled to eventually produce the stars and galaxies we see in the universe today.

From the point of Big Bang, abundant amount of matter got spewed into the space moving at tremendous speed from apparently nowhere. The matter transformed into stars which are basically gaseous spheres where nuclear fusion of smaller atoms (Hydrogen) happens to form a bigger atom (Helium). In this process some matter gets converted into energy which is emitted as heat and light.

There are about 100 Billion (10¹¹) galaxies in the universe. The Sun is in the Milky Way galaxy which alone has a hundred billion (10¹¹) stars. Light takes 100,000 years to cross the milky way. Our nearest spiral galaxy, the Andromeda Spiral Galaxy, is over 2 Million light years away.

The Universe has an estimated mass of 10^53to60 KG and contains 6x 10⁷⁹ atoms. A grain of sand has 10²³ atoms. The universe is estimated to be 35 to 192 billion light years across.

Let's imagine that the visible universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actually 10³⁵ light year universe in comparison?

If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 10⁶⁰ of such golf balls! So how big a volume would 10⁶⁰ golf balls fill up? A sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.

This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 light years/second. We can cross Milky way in one second at this speed. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 10¹⁸ light years.

And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 10³⁵ light years across. So, lets travel a quintillion light years every second. How long would it take to cross from one side of the universe to the other? 3.7 billion years.

Mind boggling? You betcha !