Now that the college football season is over I will go back to one of my favorites, the Eagle Nebula...Better know to some as the Pillars of Creation. One of the 1st images from the Hubble Telescope after its cataract surgery in 1993.
I am told that Stars are born here, that the left pillar is 4 light years from top to bottom...that is 5,878.5 billion miles x 4. It is such a large number that I could not figure out how to do it with the zero's. So 23,514 billion miles or 23.514 trillion miles?
This Nebula is 7,000 light years from earth. There really is no historical time frame to compare when the light we now see from this nebula started its journey to us. The Pyramid of Khufu in Giza was built around 2560 BC. So the light started 2400 years before the Great Pyramid was built. Our galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across, and we can only see about 6,000 light years into the disk in the visible spectrum. Estimates project that there are between 100 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. They also think that each star has at least one planet, which means there are likely to be hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way – billions of which are believed to be the size and mass of the Earth. And on top of that, they think the KNOWN Universe hold 10,000 galaxies...
Like all of the Universe, I cant comprehend any of that, so it seems very appropriate for me...