God's Awesome Power

One of the best ways to be completely awed by God's work, is to take just a peek at the science of the solar system and universe. I'm not talking String Theory here. (Although my favorite physicist, Michio Kaku, makes that sound easy too.) No, I'm merely referring to basic facts and trivia. Keep in mind that some of these facts are from memory, some are verified, and some are estimates which are hotly debated.

Our solar system now officially (International Astronomical Union) has one sun, eight planets, and three dwarf planets. Pluto was demoted in 2006, now classified as a dwarf planet along with Ceres and Eris. Some of the planets have moons which are larger then the smaller planets.

Jupiter is a gas giant – its composition is primarily gaseous material. It's so large that 10 Earths could fit in the eye of that big storm alone, and its actual mass is about 320 times that of the Earth – that's a lot of gas.

Most of us know that a planet's rotation on axis makes a day, and a complete revolution around the sun makes a year. Well, Venus rotates so slowly on axis that it's day is much longer then it's year.

Our sun is big – really big! On average it is two to three times larger then the average size of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Its actual mass is about 333,000 times that of the Earth. The sun, and hence our solar system, is about half way out from the center of our galaxy, about 26,000 light years. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter, but only about 12,000 light years in thickness (A light year is how far light travels in a year – about 6 trillion miles.) Our solar system rotates around our spiral galaxy, similar to the way our planet rotates around the sun, and completes one revolution approximately every 250 million years.

Let's really crunch some numbers. Did you know that every single star you see with the unaided eye is from our own galaxy? It is estimated that the Milky Way has about 300 billion stars – many of them much smaller then our sun – and this is only the tiniest fraction of stars in the universe.

How many galaxies and stars in the universe? According to the National Maritime Museum in the UK, the universe probably contains more than 100 billion galaxies. And best estimates suggest that there are at least 70 thousand million million million (70 sextillion) stars in the universe.

Now, who wants to tell me that God couldn't communicate directly with each and every one of us – at the same moment – if there were a need to tell us something?

One Deist Φ