BILLIONS AND BILLIONS—“WHEN I HEARD THE LEARNED ASTRONOMER….”

BILLIONS AND BILLIONS—“WHEN I HEARD THE LEARNED ASTRONOMER….” This article by Ross Pomeroy on RealClearScience displays an image of the heavens taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The photo shows 10,000 specks of color and light—each of which is a galaxy. And the photo covers only a small fraction of the sky; it would take 40 million of such images to cover the entire sky.

Pomeroy summarizes: Our sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies.

I posted here about what happened an instant after the Big Bang and quoted Walt Whitman:

When I Heard the Learned Astronomer

by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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