The Heavens (and their numbers) Declare the Glory of God
Posted in Science, Worship on Sep 11th, 2007 2 Comments »
Presented here is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The subject is disk galaxy NGC 5866. On a clear night, you might be able to spot this galaxy with a four-inch-wide telescope in your backyard—but it would look like a fuzzy wisp and you’d have to really know what you were looking for. It is about 63,000 times dimmer than the planet Jupiter.
This galaxy is almost 50 million light-years away—what you see here is the way a sliver of the universe looked 50,000,000 years ago.
This galaxy is 60,000 light-years across. That means that a star could explode at one end of the disk and an observer at the opposite end of the disk wouldn’t see it for 60,000 years.
How big is a distance of 60,000 light-years? Let’s suppose you had a map of this galaxy with a scale of 1 atom on the map = 1 meter in space. Got that? 1 atom = 1 meter. Represented on such a map, our entire solar system would fit within one and a half football fields’ area. The USA would occupy a half a millimeter. You and I would need about an atom and a half.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
But how big would the map be? It would cover 1/3 of the distance from the Earth to the sun. Such a map would be so big, you could use it to gift-wrap all of the planets in the solar system over 25,000 times. And each one of us takes up about an atom’s worth of real estate on that map.
Sorry, that’s the best I can do to make the size of this faraway galaxy even remotely comprehensible.
Then Job answered the Lord and said:
“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?
I lay my hand on my mouth.
I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
twice, but I will proceed no further.”
But there’s more to it than sheer size. Click on the image above to see a large version. Or if you’re really ambitious, download the 11-megabyte full-resolution version.
Look in the background, far beyond NGC 5866. What do you see?
More galaxies. Lots of them. Literally hundreds of them. They’re all over the place. With millions, maybe billions, of stars in each of them. And those background galaxies are millions-to-billions of light-years farther away.
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
There’s more. Look closely at the dark edge-on view of the disk. What do you see?
You see tiny dots of bright, bluish light. Those “dots”—barely visible unless you look at the full-resolution version—are clusters of a million stars. Each. Our entire solar system would fit inside one of those dots many, many times over.
We have one star, a wimp by cosmic standards, and it lives a hundred million miles away. It takes light from our sun less than ten minutes to reach us.
In one dot that you can’t see unless you download a gigantic photograph taken by a satellite with a 2.5-hour exposure time, there are millions of stars that put our sun to shame. And their light is just now reaching us after a journey that took 50 million years.
You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning,
and the heavens are the work of your hands;
they will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment,
like a robe you will roll them up,
like a garment they will be changed.
But you are the same,
and your years will have no end.
No more words… I am undone. O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!
Update: Get Google Earth and view NGC 5866 as it appears in the sky, just west of the Big Dipper.
