HOW FAST? You’re watching a farmer, about a quarter mile away, pound a post into the ground with a sledge hammer. You see the hammer hit the post and you know more than a second will pass before you hear the whack. You know this because you have learned that light travels faster than sound.

But do you realize just how much faster?

In one second sound travels about one quarter mile. (Varies depending on temperature.)

In one second a beam of light, if it could bend, could travel more than SEVEN TIMES around our earth at the equater--186,282 feet per SECOND. Think of what that means.

A beam of light from the moon (250,000 miles away) takes 1.3 seconds to reach the earth.

It takes 8.3 minutes to reach us from the sun.

Our sun is a star. The next nearest star/sun, Proxima Centauri, is so far away that a beam of light from it takes 4.2 YEARS to reach us. (I won’t write down the distance in miles, takes too much space.) Imagine, at 186,000 miles every second , it takes more than four years to get here. We call that distance 4.1 light years.

Many other stars we can see are hundreds of light years away, some are thousands, even millions of light years away. When you see a star , say, 10,000 light years away you are seeing it as it looked 10,000 years ago. It may not even exist any more--that can happen--but to your eyes, there she is.

HOW HUGE? Our sun is big enough that if it were hollow it could hold one million planets the size of our earth, and there would be plenty of room for more.  But many other stars are far larger, Mu Cephai is so big that if it were hollow you could dump 1600 suns the size of our sun into it. You can see Mu Cephai with the naked eye, but telescopes make it possible to see  even bigger stars that are farther away.

But our sun and Mu Cephai are just dots in the sky like all the stars--400 billion of them--in the Milky Way galaxy. A galaxy is an unbelievably huge group of stars. And there are 170 known galaxies, some much larger than the one we’re a part of.

HOW OLD? The best scientific estimates for the age of each event mentioned below:

First known mammals, 220 million years.

First simple life forms on earth, 3.4 billion years

Our solar system, including earth, 4.5 billion years

Milky Way Galaxy, 13.2 billion years

The known universe, 13.8 billion years

HOW AMAZING?  It would take hundreds of books just to list a fraction of the features of our universe. Here  are a few:

A supernova is the violent death of a giant star, it shows up as a giant explosion. One reason stars “die” is that they have burned up all their fuel. Supernovas show up as clouds in space where stars used to be.

The black hole is “a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can’t get out.” There is one near the centre of our galaxy.

The planet Saturn has at least 53 moons. Scientists think there may be 82 in total.

There is a red spot on our largest planet, Jupiter, which is a gigantic storm that has been seen raging there for at least 150 years. It has been as much as 30,000 miles in length, but it has been shrinking in recent years.

Our universe: A fascinating  place we live in indeed. And all we can do is look after our little island here in the vast ocean of space around us.

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