(AP Photo/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) Ever felt like a tiny insignificant dot in a big, big world?
Well you were right!
Pictures taken by the Cassini spacecraft and released this week by NASA can confirm that, here on planet Earth, we are just a microscopic part of an unimaginably enormous universe.
A long-distance photo of Earth was taken from 1.44 billion kilometres away as Cassini orbited Saturn. The image shows Saturn's distinctive rings in the foreground and our miniscule planet (marked with an arrow) as a remote and almost imperceptible dot far, far away.
The mathematics needed to calculate the number of stars and enormity of the size of Space is simply too mind boggling for most of us mere mortals, but according to astronomer estimates our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, contains up to 400 billion stars. However, our galaxy is just one of more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe – each containing anything up to 100 trillion stars, depending on shape and size of galaxy.
Far too many zeros involved for me to work out but we are certainly talking at least a septillion stars (1 followed by 24 zeros) – at a minimum!
So - is mankind alone in this universe – what do you think?
Well you were right!
Pictures taken by the Cassini spacecraft and released this week by NASA can confirm that, here on planet Earth, we are just a microscopic part of an unimaginably enormous universe.
A long-distance photo of Earth was taken from 1.44 billion kilometres away as Cassini orbited Saturn. The image shows Saturn's distinctive rings in the foreground and our miniscule planet (marked with an arrow) as a remote and almost imperceptible dot far, far away.
The mathematics needed to calculate the number of stars and enormity of the size of Space is simply too mind boggling for most of us mere mortals, but according to astronomer estimates our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, contains up to 400 billion stars. However, our galaxy is just one of more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe – each containing anything up to 100 trillion stars, depending on shape and size of galaxy.
Far too many zeros involved for me to work out but we are certainly talking at least a septillion stars (1 followed by 24 zeros) – at a minimum!
So - is mankind alone in this universe – what do you think?
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