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The Sun's Neighborhood  

By: De_Composed in 6TH POPE | Recommend this post (1)
Sat, 17 Feb 24 7:05 AM | 63 view(s)
Boardmark this board | 6th Edition Pope Board 		Msg. 50265 of 60008
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One of the things I love about New Hampshire is its amazing view of the stars. Most people take them for granted. They don't stop to consider that everything they see in the night sky - with the sole exception of Andromeda - is a part of our galaxy, the Milky Way. In fact, we can only see a small part of the Milky Way. Most of it is within or blocked by the bulging galactic core with its hundreds of billions of densely packed stars. Fortunately, our sun is closer to the outside of the Milky Way's disk and we can see a great deal - including the aforementioned "bulge."

It's known that light travels at about 5.88 trillion miles per year, and that when we see things, we're seeing them as they were when light left them headed our way. We see the past. I find that amazing to this day!

When we look at Proxima Centauri, our nearest celestial neighbor, we're seeing it as it appeared 4.2 years ago - because the star is 4.2 light years away from the Earth. (You'll have to take my word on this. Proxima Centauri is a very low magnitude star that you can't actually see with the naked eye.)

The heart of the Milky Way is about 26,000 light years away. If we could see it, which we can't because of the bulge, we'd be looking back in time 26,000 years. But the bulge itself is about 13,000 light years away.

I'm bringing this up because of my last book's brief discussion of a 6,000 year old universe... a theory which is sometimes taught by Creationists. The simple fact is, if our universe was 6,000 years old, we would not today be able to see any stars that are more than 6,000 light years away from ours. The mere fact that we can see the bulge of stars eclipsing the Milky Way's core means that the bulge is AT LEAST 13,000 years old.

Then there is Andromeda... which some of us can see with the naked eye. Andromeda is a galaxy in its own right, and it's about 2.5 million light years away. There's no need to bring up Andromeda's galactic bulge. The fact that we can see Andromeda at all means that we're seeing 2.5 million years into the past. No telescope required.

And... pffft. There goes the 6,000-year-old-universe theory.

The illustration below shows our galaxy and some of its landmarks including our sun. The green circle represents the amount of the galaxy we would be able to see if the starlight reaching us was, at most, 6,000 years old, as it would be if that part of Creationism was correct.



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