Welcome to earth. Enjoy your stay.
Here are some facts about Earth and its relationship to the rest of our galaxy.
The Earth revolves on its own axis once every 24 hours and circles its sun in 365 days, one of several hundred billion suns that constitute our galaxy.
This solar system consists of the remains of an ancient sun.
Cassiopeia A – an exploded star
Earth's Sun and solar system are embedded in a broad pancake of stars deep within the disk of the Milky Way galaxy. Even from a distance, it is impossible to see our galaxy’s large-scale features other than the disk.
Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. A photon of light could travel around the Earth seven times in one second.
Earth's sun travels at the rate of 136 miles per second around the periphery of our native galaxy circling it once every 230 million years.
The number of seconds in a year is 31,557,600. Laying 31.5 million lengths of 186,000 miles each end to end you will have the distance light travels in one year, about six trillion miles which is called a light-year.
If you traveled at the speed of light you would leave this solar system in about 5.5 hours at which point our sun would a point of light lost in a sea of stars.
If you started counting the 105 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, at the rate of 100 per minute it would take you 2000 years. The nearest sun to our sun is Alpha in the Centauri system, about 4 light years or 25 trillion miles from Earth.
Some astronomers estimate that as high as 50% of these stars in our galaxy may have orbiting planets and over a billion (2%) of those are capable of sustaining life.
Traveling at the speed of light it will take you about 25,000 years to reach the hub of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Going to the outer rim of our galaxy will take about 5,000 years.
More distant at about 2.2 million light-years is the Andromeda (M31) galaxy, twice the size of our Milky Way and contain 250 billion stars.
A little further away you'll find the galaxy M87 (750-1000 billion stars), the galaxies of NGC2997 and NGC1365. Astronomers now give galaxies numbers instead of names because there are so many. Even counting galaxies at 100 per minute, life on Earth has not existed long enough to count all of them.
Galaxies exist in groups called island universes and this local island universe contains about 30 galaxies with about 10 trillion stars. Island universes are about a million times further apart than galaxies. If you continue to travel out about 50 million light-years you will leave this island universe where you will encounter more island universes than are countable.
In an ancient Icelandic tale there exists within the great warrior hall 540 doors where there would pass 800 divine warriors to engage in battle with the anti-gods until mutual annihilation. 800 x 540 = 432,000.
Within the universes there are cycles within cycles, often mentioned in stories in ancient cultures of Earth.
One complete cycle of the twelve zodiacal signs of Earth is 25,920 years. If you divide 25,920 by 60, the basic unit of measurement throughout history, the answer is 432. In ancient Hindu stories the number of years reckoned to the present cycle of time is 432,000, which falls in the great cycle of 4,320,000 years.
From Babylon there is the account of time between the rise of the first city and the coming of the flood, 432,000 years had elapsed. In the Old Testament, from Adam to Noah there was a span of 1656 years. In 1656 years there are 86,400 seven-day weeks, and 86,400 divided by 2 is 43,200.
In accord with the rhythm of the universe, the average heart rate for a man is 60 beats per minute, times 60 minutes is 3600 beats per hour which is 43,200 times every 12 hours.
There is the concept that the universe is a living being in the likeness of a great mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and of death have their existence. The human body is in miniature a duplicate of that macrocosmic form. Feel the natural rhythm that you are. You are a part of and also the universe. You have always been here.
No take 2 minutes to think about what you've read. Close your eyes and imagine the universe is within you, galaxies, stars, planets.
more....
The optimum number of dimples on a golf ball was found to be 432.
"Galaxies Galore, Games and More" is a learning module designed to allow elementary school students to use their observational skills to recognize patterns and learn how galaxies are classified. GO
Hands On Universe at University of California Berkeley --> GO
some images on this page are from hubble
some text on this page are from Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell
