Astronomy jaw-droppers — District meeting presentation — New Zealand Hamilton Mission
Astronomy jaw-droppers, God’s infinite universe, Hawera District Meeting, April 21, 2015
- The majesty and glory of God, as is witnessed in the heavens!
- How many worlds?
- How long did it take?“…worlds without number have I created, and for my own purposes have I created them, and by my Son were they created…”
- How does He keep track of them all?
- How far? How long? How deep? Astronomical “jaw-droppers”
- Astronomical jaw-droppers
- It would take one million earth-volumes to equal the volume of the Sun
- Earth-sun comparison: if the earth is compared to a penny, the sun would be 6 feet in diameter (diameter of earth is ~ 8000 miles, diameter of the sun is ~ 865,000 miles)
- A star in Orion named Betelgeuse is a red-giant. If you placed it where our Sun resides, Betelgeuse would consume our solar system out to the orbit of Jupiter!
- It would take one million Sun volumes to equal the volume of Betelgeuse!
- The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. A photon of light can travel around the equator of Earth 7.5 times in one second ( a jetliner would take ~ 30 hours to travel around the equator once )
- Sun light, traveling at the speed of light, takes 8 minutes to travel to earth. It takes 5.5 hours to travel to Pluto.
- Nearest star to us is Alpha Centauri. If we used a golf ball to represent our Sun, we would place another golf ball in INVERCARGILL (850 miles distant) to accurately represent the distance between the two. The distance is 24 TRILLION miles (4.5 light years).
- How big is a TRILLION? A stack of 1 trillion newly-printed $1 bills, turned on its side, would go around the equator 2.5 times.
- Size of our galaxy, the Milky Way? If a dinner plate represented our solar system, the continent of Australia would represent the size of our galaxy.
- There are 300,000,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
- It takes the Milky Way galaxy 265 million years to rotate once, with its spin speed of 500,000 miles per hour!
- There are approximately 100,000,000 galaxies.
- Heavenly Father’s work and glory
- Astronomers estimate that 1 out of every 5 suns in the Milky Way galaxy have earth-sized planets. If each of them supported life, that would be 8.8 billions inhabited earths! If only 1 in every 1000 supported life, that would be 3 million earths.
- With the vastness of His creations, can He really care about me?
- Wonderful astronomy verses: Doctrine and Covenants 88:45-48 and Alma 30:40-44
- Why was our earth chosen as the place where Christ would work out the Atonement?
- Does He find joy in the vast number of His creations? Yes, but His greatest joy is found in bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of His children, including you and me!
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