Every once in a while I get these really deep thoughts, then my head starts to hurt so I stop. Usually it's about the nature of the universe or something.
For example.
Why does the Universe exist? What purpose does it have? Where did it all begin?
Do you realize how big the Universe is? Well, if you shined a flashlight across our Galazy (The Milky Way) from one side to the other, it would take the light 100,000 years to get to the other side. It would take 3,000 years for the light to get from one edge of the bulge to the other. It would take 25,000 years for light to get from this Galaxy to the next, which we are also colliding with.
There are millions of galaxys in our universe. But where is the Universe? Most experts agree that our universe is expanding at the speed of light. But what is it expanding into? Is it expanding into anything? If you could get to the end of the universe, what would be past that plane and what is it? Is it matter? Or is it totally nothing, and the expansion of the universe causes something to be there.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet
That's evolving
And revolving
At nine thousand miles an hour.
It's orbiting at nineteen miles a second,
so it's reckoned,
'Round the sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me,
and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm,
at fourteen thousand miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred million stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle
sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us
it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years
From Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
It's the Milky Way galaxy that is 100,000 light years across, not the universe. (But you knew that already.)
The nearest major galaxy is Andromeda, which is 2 million light years away.
The nearest minor galaxy is the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy - which is actually partly inside the Milky Way, since we are currently colliding with it.
As for the edge of the Universe - most cosmologists think that there isn't one. You can keep travelling in a straight line forever without reaching the edge - though you may return to your starting point due to the curvature of spacetime. The universe isn't expanding into anything, because the universe is what there is.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
Those sound like good questions for "Ask Jen!"
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