from Child of the
Wind, Bruce Cockburn (1991)
We live in an enormous universe! A major part of this course is devoted to finding out just where we are in relation to the stars. The following table summarizes some of this for you. How we determined these distances will occupy us in future lectures.
| Sun - Earth | 1 A.U. | ||
| .. | 93 M miles | ||
| 1.5 x 1011 m | |||
| Sun - stars | |||
| proxima Centauri | 4.2 ly | ||
| a Cen | 4.3 ly | ||
| Sirius | 8.6 ly | ||
| Procyon | 11.4 ly | ||
| Altair | 16.5 ly | ||
| Arcturus | 25 ly | ||
| Vega | 25 ly | ||
| Deneb | 1470 ly! | ||
| Sun - clusters | |||
| Pleiades | 410 ly | ||
| Orion Nebula | 1500 ly | ||
| Sun - nearest Galaxies | |||
| (LMC) | 150 Kly | ||
| M31 | 2.2 Mly | ||
| M83 | 27 Mly | ||
| M87 | 50 Mly | ||
| Virgo Cluster | 65 Mly | ||
| Most distant Galaxies | > 13 GMly |
The average distance to the bright stars you see is about 300 ly. This is not the same as the average distance between stars in our neighbourhood - why?
Technical Stuff:
| By the end of the 19th century it was becoming clear just how enormous our universe is. This had direct impact in culture and helped to shape our understanding of ourselves in relationship to the rest of the world. As an example consider the writing of Thomas Hardy and his book Two on A Tower, published in 1882. In this book he explores love between two very different social classes (with the usual cheery end of most Hardy novels). He also introduces the dread that living in such a vast universe casts on us all. In the following excerpt, Lady Constantine and Swithin St.Cleve discuss the immensity of the universe: | |
 |
'We are now traversing distances beside which the immense line stretching from the earth to the sun is but an invisible point',said the youth. 'When just now, we had reached a planet whose remoteness is a hundred times the remoteness of the sun from the earth, we were only a two thousandth part of the journey to the spot at which we have optically arrived now.''O pray don't; it overpowers me!' she replied, not without seriousness. 'It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live; it quite annihilates me.''If it annihilates your ladyship to roam over these yawning spaces just once, think how it must annihilate me to be, as it were, in constant suspension amid them night after night.' |
| This "cosmic angst" has been with us for more than a century and has clearly contributed to our thought of "who we are". Consider the chilling conclusion of Jacques Monod" | |
“Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance” |
|
| Chance
and Necessity, 1970 |
|
How has all of this challenged or shaped our concept of "God"? Does it challenge your notion of a personal God?
Answering this will occupy us for a good part of this term. As we will see, the ancient Greeks had a rough idea about the size of the Solar System but gauging the distance to even the nearest stars was an enormous achievement that didn't really begin until the mid-19th century.
Seeds:Chp1;
1-9, Chp 2; 11-29 
