The universe is too vast to comprehend, with more stars than words spoken in human history, grains of sand on Earth, and seconds Earth has existed. Astronomers estimate a trillion stars exist. The universe’s age is about 13.7 billion years, and its shape is unknown. Cosmic microwave background radiation is an afterglow from the Big Bang.
You could talk until you were blue in the face, but you’d never be able to articulate the enormity of the universe. Speaking of words, American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson provides this perspective: If you somehow counted all the words and sounds ever spoken throughout human history, it still wouldn’t come close to the number of stars in the universe. Let’s talk astronomical! And there are other ways of trying to conceptualize the vastness of the universe that will make you feel even more insignificant.
You might also consider that there are more stars than grains of sand in all of Earth’s beaches and deserts, or that stars exceed the number of seconds the Earth has existed. In essence, the universe is so large that we have no point of reference for it. We can compare, but we are always inferior. If that enormity is frightening, remember what Tyson had to say about our connection to this great place: “The four most common chemically active elements in the universe – hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen – are the four most common elements of life. on earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.” For the record, while we have no way of knowing exactly how many stars the universe contains, astronomers have approximated this by multiplying the estimated number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way (400 billion), by the estimated number of galaxies in the universe (170 billion) to get a trillion stars, which is a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros.
Looking into the universe:
By observing the rate of expansion of the universe, astronomers have estimated its age at about 13.7 billion years.
There is no universally agreed upon shape (no pun intended) for the universe. Some astronomers even think that ours could be just one of many.
A small amount of static that we used to see between channels on analog TVs was caused by the cosmic microwave background radiation, a kind of “afterglow” resulting from the Big Bang.
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