Posted on 12/08/2011 7:07:54 PM PST by chessplayer
I can’t comprehend the vastness of space, to me, there has to be an end out there like the walls of a box.
Yeah, I think with the nearby stars, they can use the parallax method, which is pretty certain, but for the further out ones, it involves more guesswork.
I presume that this article is describing black holes where the event horizon is about the diameter of the orbit of Neptune around the sun. Everything inside that cannot escape.
The matter that makes up a black hole is "ordinary matter," but squished tight. The atoms around us, what we think of as "solid" stuff, is mostly space. If the nucleus is a marble, the electron shell of hydrogen is about a half-mile diameter (helium is a little smaller, but still, the point being, atoms are mostly empty). Under intense pressure, such as provided by gravity and many close neighboring particles, the electrons meet the nuclei, but the matter is still "ordinary," being detectable by its mass.
If the earth was squished tight, it would be, IIRC, about 150 yard radius. Squished tight enough, it would make a black hole with an event horizon under that size.
Your math is off, somehow. From the sun to Neptune is about 4.55 billion km - so give the solar system a diameter of about 9 billion km. Light travels about 300,000 km per second (sun to earth, about 8 minutes). So, 30,000 seconds times 300,000 km/sec is 9 that billion km. An object ten time bigger (that the orbit of Neptune) is covered by light in 300,000 seconds, about 3.5 days.
Or, just take this (uses a bigger solar system diameter), from your link ...
This means you could put the Solar System about 3440 times between the Sun and the nearest star taking this definition.
If you haven't read "Flatland," grab a copy online and check it out.
The point being, that although we can't picture it, it may be possible to have a finite volume that doesn't end like the walls of a box (or sphere).
Earth has a finite area, but no edge in 2-d.
Even then, the volume of the universe is mind boggling - and so is the emptiness - and so is the physical violence! Collisions, fusion, heat, velocities, energy releases that are so far beyond our earth-bound experience, that they defy comprehension. Even though mother nature is pretty tough, the surface of the earth is a very peaceful corner of the universe.
“I can’t comprehend the vastness of space, to me, there has to be an end out there like the walls of a box.”
Yes, and what is crazy is that they say that space it self is expanding like a balloon, getting bigger and bigger until some day everything is so cold that there will be no energy for anything to move.
But, that is just our universe. Some of these guys think that there are millions of universes that are constantly bubbling up from a constant big bang. Some of these over lap with ours without us realizing it. So it looks like a bath tub with bubbles, each its own universe.
That is cool to my thinking because it sounds like what Christians have always said — that this world is passing away, that there is a better place we are going. Think the many worlds of CS Lewis’s Narnia stories.
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