The Size and Age of the Universe Is Beyond Our Understanding

Have you given your existence much thought? consider yourself very special and unique the odds against you being here are astronomical.

British spelling!

I have written this story for people like myself in a way that should be easy to understand. Maybe you have never given the subject much thought.

But you will also need a good imagination.

Below are a few paragraphs from my story.

As a young child, I remember looking up at the night sky and wondering what the twinkling lights were, they were described to me by my father as “stars” Lying in my bed that night I tried to imagine where space ends, it is now 65 years later and I am still asking that same question.

For some people that tiny piece of information about the stars is sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, but not for me, I needed to know more.

As it turns out, apart from the 5 planets known as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, that can sometimes be seen with the naked eye, each one of the individual dots of light that we see in the night sky is emanating from a super-heated gas ball similar to our local star the Sun, some of the stars will be smaller than our Sun and some unbelievably larger.

The planets don’t twinkle like the stars, being a lot closer to the Earth means that their light is not affected so much by the Earth’s atmosphere.

I am much older now but still trying to understand it all, or at least some of it, how big is the Universe, where did it come from, and the biggest question for me as I said, where does it end?

Just a few hundred years ago most people believed that everything in space that could be seen with the naked eye, revolved around the Earth and you would have been a very brave man or woman to think otherwise and say it out loud.

Following the invention of the first telescopes in the early 1600s, people gained a far better understanding of how the visible objects in the sky behaved and realised that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe, but just a very small insignificant part of it.

But having said that, if it was ever established that our planet was the only place in the entire Universe to support intelligent life, then surely our world would be a very special and important place indeed.

The Solar System is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, at its centre is an average G-type main-sequence star or yellow dwarf star which we call the Sun, like other G-type stars it is white, but appears yellow through the Earth’s atmosphere, if you were looking at the Sun from space, then you would see it as white, its true colour.

You can navigate to part one of my story here. Enjoy

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