The Universe

Do you realize that if you could travel at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles a second, that in just two seconds you would be past the moon; you wouldn't reach the nearest star that you can see with the naked eye for four years, and ten billion years later you still would not be to the edge of the known universe?

Think about this: everything you can see with the naked eye belongs to the galaxy in which we live. But astronomers now tell us that there are at least 20 galaxies within 2 1/2 million light years of us, and with their giant telescopes they have discovered at least one billion galaxies.

Now if that doesn't make you feel small, we now know that the galaxies are scattered about in an irregular pattern and between them there are vast amounts of space. The distance from one edge of an average galaxy to the other edge is approximately 600,000 trillion miles. The average distance from one galaxy to another is 20 million trillion miles. Now to put this another way, a light year is the distance that light travels in one year at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. A light year is approximately six trillion miles. Now translated into these terms, the size of an average galaxy is 100,000 light years, and the distance between them is roughly three million light years.

But listen to this. We now know that the galaxies are not fixed in space, but are moving away from each other at tremendous speeds. The famous scientist, Edwin Hubble, has calculated that the most distant galaxies are retreating from us at the rate of 100 million miles per hour. In other words, everything is retreating from everything. Nothing is coming toward us, nor is anything coming toward any other galaxy. That means that this universe is expanding at an exponential rate. All of it came into being when God just spoke it into existence!

Illustration from Dr. James Merritt