Page 73 - The Creation Of The Universe

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) 71

We shall start by asking how big the universe is.
The planet Earth is a part of the solar system. In this system there are
nine major planets with fifty-four satellites, and an uncounted number of
asteroids all revolving around a single star called "Sun", a middle-sized star
compared with others in the universe. Earth is the third planet from the
Sun.
Let us first try to understand the size of this system. The diameter of the
Sun is 103 times that of the Earth. To visualize this, the planet Earth has di-
ameter of 12,200 kms. If we scaled that down to the dimensions of a glass
bead, the Sun would be about the size of soccer ball. But the interesting
thing is the distance between the two. Keeping to the same scale, the two
balls should be 280 meters apart. Some of the objects representing the out-
er planets would have to be set several kilometers away.
Big though this might seem, the solar system is a quite miniscule in size
compared with the Milky Way, the galaxy in which it is located. There are
over 250 billion stars in the Milky Way–some similar to the Sun, others big-
ger, others smaller. The star nearest to the Sun is Alpha Centauri. If we
wanted to add Alpha Centauri in our model system, it would have to be lo-
cated 78,000 kilometers away.
That's too big for almost anyone to grasp, so let's reduce the scale. We'll
assume the Earth to be as big as a dust-particle. That would make the Sun
as big as a hazelnut about three meters from the Earth. On this scale, Alpha
Centauri would have to be located 640 kilometers from the Sun.
The Milky Way consists of about 250 billion stars with similarly mind-
boggling distances between them. The Sun is located closer to the edge of
this spiral-shaped galaxy than it is to the center.
Even the Milky Way is dwarfed by the vast size of the whole universe.
It is just one of many galaxies–nearly 300 billion of them according to re-
cent calculations. And the distances between galaxies are millions of times
greater than that between the Sun and Alpha Centauri.
George Greenstein, in The Symbiotic Universe, comments on this enor-
mous vastness:
Had the stars been somewhat closer, astrophysics would not have been