Astounding Beginnings

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).

Glancing through a magazine one afternoon, I ran across this imaginative piece of trivia:

If the solar system were shrunk to the size of New York's Manhattan Island, the next nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 5,500 miles away, in Jerusalem.

We know, for instance, that traveling at the speed of light, we could reach the sun in about eight minutes. Traveling on at lightspeed, it would take more than four years to reach the next nearest star. At our current rate of space travel, however, it would take 100,000 years.

If we were to shrink the sun to the size of a pin head, the solar system would fill a large living room.

Let's say the living room is in a beach house of the coast of Southern California. Alpha Centauri, that next nearest star, would be on Catalina Island, 26 miles away. Shrunk to this scale, our entire galaxy, the Milky Way, with its 200 billion stars, would be 600,000 miles in diameter. It's not, of course, it's a trillion times larger than that.

Which accounts for one galaxy. But there are more than 10 billion in the observable universe.

"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."

© 2005