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This Is How Mind Numbingly Big The Universe Truly Is
The universe by the numbers
The James Webb Telescope recently came online, and it has many people dreaming about distant parts of the universe. This powerful new camera has the capability to peer deeper into space than we ever have before. One thing that the James Webb Telescope is going to remind people of is how astonishingly large the universe is.
When people look up into the night sky and see the stars twinkling back at them, they are only seeing a tiny fraction of what is out there. The stars visible to the naked eye are generally close by and in no way represent how truly vast the universe is. Behind the visible stars are trillions of other objects jittering around in the void that is out of the reach of the naked eye and occasionally out of the reach of human comprehension.
To borrow a famous phrase from Douglas Adams: space is big.
Our Solar System
It takes three days to fly to the moon. When Frank Sinatra sang about flying to the moon, I doubt he knew it would take that long. There is nothing romantic about a three-day road trip crammed into a small…
