Whenever you look up at the night sky, the magnitude of the universe is not only mind bending but difficult to comprehend. When you look at the picture to the left, those aren’t stars you are looking at, they are galaxies. This picture is a Hubble Ultra Deep Field image which is an infinitesimally slender core sample drilled out of the universe. This sample is as if you were looking at the Universe through a soda straw. Just from this picture, you can see that the numbers of galaxies in our Universe are astronomical. In order to put this into perspective, it’s good to review where we stand in comparison to this colossal existence of world’s without end. What the image of the night sky offers is oddly enough a glimpse of ourselves. For if we were to go the other direction and peer into the intricacies of our own bodies, we would likewise find incredibly small micro universes inside ourselves. But for now, let’s take a look at the marvel of our world that exists outside ourselves.

From an article in the Sept., ‘07 Utne magazine called “Worlds Without End”, the author takes us on a trip through the cosmos that will test your limits of comprehension. To begin, let’s talk about where we live–Earth. It is a clump of iron and magnesium and nickel, coated with a thin layer of organic matter, and sleeved in a vapor we call our atmosphere. It zips along in a nearly circular orbit around the sun, a minor star. Although we think of the sun as something major being that in proportion to the sun our Earth is a pea and the sun is a beach ball, it is not. When you compare the sun to the rest of the cosmos, it is exceedingly minor. And, to quote the author, it is “almost incomprehensibly minor.”

When you look at our Milky Way which is the galaxy for which is our neighborhood, there are at least 100 billion stars in it with our sun being one of them. To put this into perspective, if you had a bucket with a thousand marbles in it, you would need 999,999 more of those buckets to get a billion marbles. Then you’d have to repeat the process one hundred times to get the number of marbles to equal the number of stars in our galaxy. Whew! That’s a lot of marbles.

So, we revolve around the sun in about 365 days, and the sun revolves around a group of stars concentrated in the center of the Milky Way. So, how long does it take for the sun carrying along Earth, Mars, Jupiter, etc., to revolve around the center of the galaxy? Well, it takes about 230 million years or so. Does that give you an idea of how big our galaxy is?

Okay, now here’s where it gets interesting. Being that our galaxy is so large, you would think that it is a major galaxy right? No, it’s not. At any given moment, there are hundreds of thousands of millions of galaxies. There are maybe as many as 125 billion which means that there may be more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in our Milky Way. And, you remember how many marbles that was. Well, now we have that many galaxies with that many marbles in each.

So, what would that number look like? Let’s say there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. And, let’s say there are 100 billion galaxies in our universe. With ultra-massive and dwarf galaxies assuming to average out, there might be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. So, exactly what is this number? That’s 10 sextillion. To imagine this another way, if every person on Earth could name his or her share of stars, each would get to name 1.5 trillion of them.

It is very difficult to wrap your mind around numbers this large. But to ignore the vastness of the universe is to ignore our own existence. It’s all out there every night, trillions of them streaming away at hundreds of miles per second. And, what’s even more incredible is that what you are really looking at is the past because it takes so long for the light to travel from these stars to Earth that you are actually looking at the Universe as it existed in the beginning. So, the next time you think that your problems are remarkable, stop and step outside and look at the night sky and remember that in comparison to the mind-numbing vastness of the universe, maybe things aren’t as bad as you think.