SIZE OF THE UNIVERSE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5333, 1 October 1928, Page 4

SIZE OF THE UNIVERSE.

STUPENDOUS FIGURES. “The moou, burvnearest neighbour, is 24'0,000 miles away froim us, a distance whic.h light, travelling at 186,00*0 miles a second, traverses in a little over one second; The farthest astronomical Object whose distances are known, ajre so remote that their light takes over one hundred million years to reach us,” says Sir J. H. Jeans, in a recently published bqok on astronomy. Beyond) Neptune, 2800 milliop miles, from t’he earth, is a great gap which divides) the solar system from the rest of the upiverse. The first object on the faf side of the gap is. a faint stair, Proxima Centauri, at a distance of <n,o. less -than 25,000,000 million miles, <jr more than 8000 times the distance of Neptune. The nearest stars are almost exactly a milr lion times as remote as the nearest planets. “If we represent the, earth’s orbit by a circle the size of a full-, stop (a hundredth of an inch radius), the sun. becomes an entirely invisible speck of dust, and the earth, an ultramicrosc.opic particle a millionth of an inch in diajmdter,” says the writer. “On this scale the distance to the 'Ueayqst star, Prflxima Centauri, is about. 75 yards, while that to Cirius is about 150 yards. We see vividly the isolation of the, scjlar system in space and the immensity o.f the £ a P which {separates the planets from the stars. The distance of onte hundred million light-years to th© farthest' object sp 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 inj diameter, o ( ur sun shrinks to a speck . f dust, and the earth becomes less than a millionth part of a speck of dust. The inhabitants of the earth well pause to consider the probable objective Importance of this speck of dust to the scheme of the universe as a whole.”