Something you cannot even imagine! Suppose you are standing outside, on a clear night, if you look up, how far can you see? Can you imagine how many things are out there? Are you able to visualize all the wonders of this universe? In 1609 Galileo never thought that, what he is going to endeavor, will change our understanding of this universe around us forever. His spyglass which made things seen nine times closer, was a revolutionary thing in distant viewing. With his improved 20 power telescope, he started investigating the heavens. Moon was the first target. It was the first time that a man came to know that the sur¬face of the moon was rough, with mountains and plains, contrary to the popular belief in those days that moon was perfectly round and smooth. During his study of the moon, he was surprised to discover that the sky around the moon was filled with stars, so many, nobody has ever seen before. Although the “Milky Way” was famous, previously it was thought to be a cloud of gas or dust particles. Galileo could see that there were far more than just the 1,022 stars that the an¬cient Greeks had counted. There was a time when man thought that earth was the center of the universe, and sun and all other stars were rotating around it. Nicolaus Copernicus had once suggested that earth is not the center. But it was Galileo, with his telescope, who found that some small “stars” go around Jupiter, and he counted 4 (now we know that there are 11). This discovery that moons circled something else also, other than the earth, shattered the notion that earth is the center of the universe – a totally revolutionary concept. Our picture of the universe has dramatically changed from that fateful night in 1609. We now realize that far from being the center of the universe, we are only a part of an unimpressive solar system located in a side branch of one of the many galaxies. Our own solar system rotates around a smaller star, in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy, very far away from its actual center. Our own solar system is only a tiny spot in the vast sea of almost 2 hundred billion stars in this galaxy. With the invention every bigger telescope, we found that universe is much bigger than we actually thought, even larger than we can even imagine. The moon we easily see in the sky is only about 250, 000 miles away. The sun which looks almost the size of moon is 93 million miles far away, so that sun light takes more than 8 minutes to reach earth. To travel across our Milky Way galaxy, it will take 1000 years at the speed of light. The closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is about 25 trillion miles or 4.2 light years away. Don’t forget that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. The sun is so big that a million earths can fit inside it, and the size of the earth is like a coin compared to sun, which has the size of a 9 foot ball. Now we may think that sun is the biggest thing in the universe. Wrong! Betelgeuse the brightest star in Orion constellation is so big that it cannot even fit into the big circle made by Jupiter, which is 484 million miles away from the sun. But still this is not the biggest star yet. Canis Majoris is so big that, if earth has the size of a coin, and sun has the size of 9 feet ball, then this star is 2.5 miles wide. Astronomers tried to figure out, how many galaxies will be out there. They just focused the Hubble telescope on a seemingly empty patch of night sky, without any visible stars or galaxies. For 11 days nothing came to focus, then they carefully examined the photo. Even in this tiny window of apparent empty sky, they found 10,000 galaxies, each with billions of stars. Based on their deep studies into the universe, currently astronomers estimate that there are at least 175 billion galaxies. Then how many stars in total? If we try to estimate from our galaxy’s 200 hundred billion ones, then there may be something about 350,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in total. According to the current estimates there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the beaches of the universe. What we see, when we look at the sky, is just like a handful of sand, we can pick up from the beach! Coming to the number of planets, most star systems have planets. In our galaxy alone the estimate is more than a billion planets. Then you cannot even imagine the total number of planets, the number of which is almost infinity. The visible stars may form only about 1/10th of the mass of the universe. The rest is in the form of “dark matter,” which includes objects too small or too faint for us to detect. It also includes “black holes,” which are so massive that even light cannot escape their gravitational field. The energy of the universe is also be¬yond our ability to comprehend. Each star shines brightly because it produces so much heat. Our own star, the sun, has a tempera¬ture of more than 15 million degrees (K). Remember, our sun is not the largest or hottest star in the universe. The question, which naturally come into our mind is, from where did this enormous universe with this vast amount of energy come from? Scientists have dis¬covered that stars are all moving apart from each other - the universe is expanding. That means it must have been smaller in the past. If we look back far enough, the uni-verse would have shrunken down, too small to see, then to an invisible point. This would be the beginning of the uni¬verse. Thus there is certain evidence that the universe is not eternally standing as we see today, but has a beginning. As an answer to the beginning of the universe, the big bang theory originated. Most scientists now accept this theory. However some big questions it leave behind. What would cause the universe to appear from a tiny point, or from nothing? Could this happen accidently? Or is there something or someone behind the creation of the universe? We can get some clues regarding its origin, by studying what it is like today? This universe has an orderly structure and some precise properties. Matter is not scattered around ran¬domly in the universe, but is mostly clumped into stars, planets, and other objects. Stars are not scattered randomly either, but are clumped into galaxies. And galaxies are often clumped into galactic clusters and super clusters. The most amazing thing is that, the universe has exactly the kinds of properties need¬ed for life to exist. How can we explain it? There are 3 possibilities: natural law, chance, and intelli¬gent design. Natural law: Is it natural for the universe to have such specific structure? No. No law says the universe must be arranged, to form into planets, stars, galaxies and clusters. It could have been easily made up of just clouds of dust. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that order breaks down over time. That means the universe was more orderly in the past than now. That means, tracing this idea back, in the beginning universe must have been with extremely precise original conditions. Chance: If life has to exist, the properties of this universe should be very precise. The universe should not expand too rapidly – otherwise matter would expand too rapidly to form galaxies, but no planets will be formed. On the other hand, if universe expands too slowly, matter would clump into one big clump, without forming planets. The expansion rate of the universe is so precisely set that, if there is a difference of 1 part in 10 raised to 55 (10 followed by 54 zeros), it would destroy this balance. The chances of this happening is less than winning a lottery 5 times in a row. Chance is not a good explanation for the precise conditions of the big bang. Suppose man went to the mars and find an innovative instrument lying on its surface. What will the intelligent man assume? He will surely think that some another intelligent being would have left it behind. The same kind of logic, most of the time we find it difficult to apply, when we see this orderly universe with such precise properties. Intelligent design: More than anything else, this precise orderly structure of the universe suggests that this universe was intelligently designed with some purpose. Scientists have discovered many other finely tuned properties, which are exactly required for the life to exist. For example life requires some molecules with exact properties to construct bodies, carry energy and nutrients. For these molecules to exist, there should be an an extremely precise balance among the masses of the various atomic particles and the forces holding them together. This precise structure of this universe, for its making, require unlimited intelligence and power (energy), from which we conclude there should be One with infinite intelligence and power behind it. Once scientists thought that this universe had always existed and would always exist without ever changing in any way. Now we know that it had a beginning. From the dawn of human consciousness he has always been fasci¬nated by what is “out there”. This has made him ask questions about his existence. Now at the present understanding of the universe, we are more and more convinced about the Intelligent Designer behind all these. Welcome to this page for more messages https://facebook/SomeTruthsThatYouShouldNotMiss
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 22:13:44 +0000
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