It’s just me again, batting away at my “the universe is expanding and isn’t the world amazing and don’t you think we should think of God in terms big enough to match it?” drum again. From the Daily Galaxy:
Astronomers estimate that their are billions and billions of galaxies in the observable universe (as well as some seven trillion dwarf galaxies) . Here’s how astronomers breakout the visible universe within 14 billion light years:
Superclusters in the visible universe = 10 million
Galaxy groups in the visible universe = 25 billion
Large galaxies in the visible universe = 350 billion
Dwarf galaxies in the visible universe = 7 trillion
Stars in the visible universe = 30 billion trillion (3×10²²)
I mean, thirty billion trillion stars. That sounds like a fake number my eight year old would make up. Can you even imagine such a thing as thirty billion trillion stars?!
Also, don’t you just love that the high-tech amazing instrument they are using to see farther than ever into the universe is called the VLT, and you think it must stand for something very scientific and made up of huge words you couldn’t possibly understand, only to learn that it means Very Large Telescope? I guess when you’re a telescope capable of looking for 350 billion large galaxies, fancy words are completely unnecessary.
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space ’cause there’s bugger down here on earth…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYSXBsGOVuc
And…this is why we’re friends. Monty Python forever!
And we mere mortals can usually only think of all of this in three dimensions. When an astronomer peers deep into space, they are also peering back into time. They see a galaxy a billion light-years away in a position and state that it was in a billion years ago. They have no images of where anything is now. Oops! I think my brain just blew a fuse.