(“What is Man?”)

For the next few minutes let’s try to

understand just how large the universe

really is.

The speed of light is commonly used to

measure large distances because light travels so

fast.

That speed is usually set at 186,000 miles per

second...

...but 186,000/sec is a little hard to

understand, so let’s use an illustration.

Let’s pretend that a bullet, shot from a gun

you are holding, can travel at the speed of

light.

And let’s pretend that this bullet traveled

around the earth like this:

That bullet would go

through you 7 times before you could fall out

of the way!

Our special bullet would travel to the

moon in just 1.3 seconds.

But, that same bullet would take

500 seconds (over 8 minutes) to reach

the sun.

Our Sun is wayout there!

Now let’s look at how large our sun is.

Can you find the planet Mercury?

Right!

Mercury is 36,000,000 (36 Million)miles closer to us than our Sun in this

photo of the two.

Mercury

the surface of our Sun

Mercury

the surface of our Sun

If you were to place our Earth where Mercury is, it also would be very small

compared to the sun.

EARTH

Mercury

the surface of our SunEARTH

It has been estimated that you could fit over one million earths inside the sun.

Mercury

the surface of our Sun

Besides being far away, our sun is huge!

Several planets revolve around our sun creating what we call the Solar System.

Light takes about 11 hours to cross our Solar System.

This is what we normally see on a winter’s night in

the USA.The Belt

and Sword of

Orion

Orion

Let’s take a quick

look at this star.

This is a sun called Betelgeuse.

Our Sun is huge,but Betelgeuseis much larger!

Remember our Solar System?

As fast as light travels it still takes light 8 minutes to reach Earth...

Earth

Jupiter (fifth from the sun)

… and 45 minutes to reach Jupiter.

So, how big is Betelgeuse?

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter could all orbit around the Sun

inside Betelgeuse.

Betelgeuse and our whole Solar System are just tiny specks inside a galaxy like this one.

(We have named our galaxy the Milky Way.)

Our Milky Way Galaxy would look something like this if viewed from edge-on and from very far away.

We would be about

right here!

Our Milky Way Galaxy would look something like this if we could view it from

above or below the disk.

(which we cannot do because of it’s size, as you will see shortly)

Just how large is our Milky Way Galaxy?

If you & mom were on opposite sides and you called her on the telephone it

would take over

100,000 years for her to answer and another 100,000 before you heard her!

You

Mom

Our closest neighboring sun

Using the speed of man’s fastest space probe it would take over 18,000 years

just to get to the closest star.

Our Solar System

Orion

1,500 light years

Even traveling at the speed of light (about 6 trillion MPH) it would still take 1,500 years just to get to the area of Orion,

and Orion is a close neighbor.

Our Solar System

From the time our Earth was created (about 6,000 years ago) until now, light from our Sun would only have traveled about this far.

Our Sun

we live on a tiny speck in a HUGE Galaxy.

As you can see,

Galaxies are not rare either.

Almost every object in thisphoto is a galaxy.

Each galaxy contains at least several billion stars.

Some even contain hundreds of billions of stars.

How many GALAXIES do you suppose are out there anyway?

Scientists, using the Hubble Space

Telescope, looked here for 10 days to try and find out.

In a part of the sky about the size of the

head of a straight pin held at arms

length

this is what they found:

Thousands of Galaxies, about 10 billion light years

away.

This is the 2004 Ultra Deep Field from Hubble.

It took almost 3 months to take this one picture and shows at least 10,000 galaxies 13 billion light-years away.

When you consider just how large the known Universe is when

compared to our little Milky Way Galaxy...

Betelgeuse

And how large our Milky Way is when compared to Betelgeuse...

And how large Betelgeuse is when compared to our Sun...

And how large our Sun is whencompared to the Earth...

EARTH

And how large our Earth is whencompared to us,

it makes you wonder.

What is man?

Why does God even care about us at all?

Why did He come here?

Oh, the height and depth of the love of Christ!

“This is real love. It is not that we loved God,

but that he loved us and sent his Son as a

sacrifice to take away our sins.” 1 John 4:10

“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the

sons of God.” 1 John 3:1

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