The romance of the heavens
I always need images to grasp complicated concepts, distances and speed at a cosmological scale typically don't mean much to me.
Gladly Thomson draws a simple diagram and shows that if the Sun was here --> • •<-- and the earth here, the nearest star (alpha centauri) would be one half mile away (25 trillions of miles = 4.35 light years).
Several interesting factoids are peppered throughout this chapter:
- The Earth is roughly 8,000 miles in diameter while the sun is over 800,000 miles.
- The distance betwen the sun and the earth is 96 million miles.
- Think a peppercorn next to a bowling ball - 110 bowling balls appart.
Traveling at the speed of light it would take us 8 minutes to reach the surface of the sun.
For the speed of light I have another trick: how can you visualize 196,000 miles per second? well think of your car. It takes roughly 10 years to put that mileage on, light travels that in one second. If you were to drive at 60 miles an hour continuously 24/7 it would take you 136 days to cover the distance that light covers in a second. So basically you could never drive to Alpha Centauri at 60 miles an hour. That would take you and astounding 51,156,000 years to get there. Now if you were to drive to the sun instead it would take you 183 years.
PS: One I recently learned is if we could shrink our solar system into the size of a U.S. quarter, the Milky Way galaxy would be the size of North America. (10.02.07)
