Sand, Stars and the Universe ...

I spend a lot of my present life walking on grains of sand, and occasionally think it’s the definition of countless. This morning while out on Cherry Hill Beach, my thoughts went back to something I read recently about the true scale of where we live.

If you were pick up a handful of sand from a beach, then on average you are likely holding about 100,000 tiny grains of rock ~ I may confirm this later by experiment …!

Now thinking about every other beach in the world, together with all the deserts, and all the sand on the floors of the seas and oceans, the number of grains on the planet then feels like an infinite number. But here is where it gets really interesting, if you were to take every grain of sand on the planet and multiply it by 10,000, you still would not have enough to represent the number of stars in the observable universe.

Scientists estimate there are roughly seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand on the earth, that is a 75 followed by 17 zeros. Which sounds like an impossible number to beat, but astronomers using data from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, have calculated there are at least two hundred sextillion stars in the observable universe, that is a 2 followed by 23 zeros.

To put that number into perspective, for every grain of sand on the entire planet, there are about 10,000 stars out there in the dark.

Keep in mind that is only the “observable universe”, we are only talking about the light that has had enough time to reach us since the “Big Bang”. Further to that, since the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, there are parts of space we will never see, no matter how long we wait, or how big our telescopes may get. Some cosmologists argue that the universe is actually infinite. If that is true, then the number of stars is not just more than sand, it is endless. There would be an infinite number of suns, possibly an infinite number of earth type planets, and (OMG) an infinite number of people just like us ….!!!

But sticking to the facts we can prove, we once thought our galaxy, the Milky Way, was special, but we now know it is one of 2 trillion such galaxies. Each of those contain hundreds of billions of stars, with each having at least one planet orbiting it ~ there are eight orbiting our star, the sun.

We are not just living in a big universe, we are in fact living in a crowded one. Relatively speaking, we on this planet are actually floating on our own grain of sand in a cosmic sandstorm. It is so vast, big numbers can barely describe it. We are part of something so massive, it makes our entire history look like a blink of an eye. The more we learn about what is out there, the more we should realize how little we truly occupy. The universe is not just bigger than we think, it is bigger than we can think.

So, with 10,000 stars for every grain of sand on earth, is it possible that we are the only ones looking up at the sky and wondering what is out there …?

 

Having got that out the way ~ Cherry Hill this morning was absolutely stunning. I arrived a couple of hours before high tide in bright sunshine, in the company of a very warm wind coming from the south, and as normal I had the whole beach to myself ….