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Showing posts with the label stars

seeing the face of God (Abraham Lincoln)

I never behold them [the heavens filled with stars] that I do not feel I am looking in the face of God. I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive of how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God. Abraham Lincoln

The sweeping and incomprehensible powers of Jesus the Creator

Astronomers tell us that our solar system is located in a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, a flat disc-shaped cluster of stars approximately 100,000 light years across at its widest point.  A light year is the distance light travels in one year.  Moving at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, a beam of light traverses 5.7 trillion miles in 365 days.  The size of our galaxy, then, in miles, is a staggering 5.7 trillion multiplied by 100,000.  Our galaxy is estimated to contain at least 200 billion stars, half of which likely possess solar systems similar to our own.  The next closest galaxy is Andromeda, a star system much like our own Milky Way, approximately 2.2 million light years away from us.  Furthermore, our best telescopes can probe outward into space to a distance of over 10 billion light years and view over 50 billion galaxies, each of which possesses billions of stars.  And these galaxies are the only ones we can detect with the present state of our technology [there a