SIZE OF THE UNIVERSE

Hokitika Guardian, 25 September 1928, Page 6

SIZE OF THE UNIVERSE

STUPENDOUS FIU UKKS. . V ' “The moon, our- nearest neighbour, is 240,000 miles .-away from us, a distance which light, travelling at 186,000 miles a second, traverses in a little over one-second. The farthest a-strono-(mica I objects whose distances arc .known, are so remote that- their light takes over one hundred million years .to reachns,” says Sir J. H. Jeans, in a recently published book on astronomy. Beyond Neptune, 2800 million, miles from the earth, -is a. great gap which divides the solar system from the rest of the universe. The first object on the far side of the gap is a faint star Proxima Gentauri, at a distance of no less than 25,000,000 million mles, or more than 8000 times the distance of Neptune. The nearest stars are almost exactly a million times as remote as the nearest planets. “If we represent the earth’s orbit by a circle of the -size of a fall stop (a hundredth of an inch radius), the 'sun becomes ail entirely invisible speck of dust, and the earth an ultra-niiscroscopic particle a miHionth lif an inch in diameter.” says tne writer. “On this scale the distance to the) nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 75 yards, while that to Sirius is about 150 yards.' AVe see vividly the isolation of the solar sv«; tern, in space and the immensity of the gap which separates the planets from the stars. The distance of one hundred million light-vears to the farthest object so far discussed by astronomy is represented, on the same scale by a distance of about a million miles. In this model, then, the universe is millions of miles in diameter, our sun shrinks to a speck of dust, and, the earth becomes less than a millionth part of a' speck of dust. The inhabitant of the earth may well pause to consider the probable objective importance of this speck of" dust to the scheme of the universe as a whole.”