Perspective from the 19th Hole is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write. I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.
Ever wondered how big the Milky Way is – the galaxy in which we live?
It may not be an everyday topic, but I have thought about it. And I also have heard the statistics, which prompted me to do two things: Express amazement at what I heard, and then, looked at Mr. Google to verify what I heard. Here is what I found:
The Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light-years across and about 1,000 light-years thick at its main disk.
- Diameter: About 100,000 to 120,000 light-years (nearly 600 quadrillion miles).
- Thickness: Roughly 1,000 light-years for the main stellar disk, swelling to about 10,000 to 30,000 light-years thick at the central galactic bulge.
- Our Location: The sun sits about 26,000 to 27,000 light-years away from the center of the galaxy, out on a smaller branch called the Orion Arm.
- Star Count: It holds an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars.
Hard to fathom? Yes!
Mere humans cannot grasp such size.
I also asked Google how scientists measure the size of stuff so far away. The answer: “Astronomers measure the physical size of galaxies by first finding how far away they are and then using geometry to calculate their actual width from the angle they take up in the sky.”
Don’t ask me if I understand this – because I don’t.
Then I add more facts:
- It would take 100,000 to 200,000 years to cross the Milky Way if you could travel at the speed of light.
- The Milky Way is roughly 100,000 to 200,000 light-years across, meaning how long the journey takes depends entirely on your speed.
- At the speed of light (186,282 miles per second): It would take 100,000 to 200,000 years.
- At the speed of the fastest human-made spacecraft (like NASA’s Parker Solar Probe or Voyager): It would take roughly 1.7 billion to 300 million years, depending on the exact peak velocity and path chosen.
- Walking (at a standard human pace of 5 km/h): It would take about 21 billion years, which, scientists say, is longer than the current age of the universe.
So, go beyond our galaxy and consider our neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. It spans approximately 220,000 to 260,000 light-years in diameter, making it roughly twice the size of the Milky Way.
- Diameter: About 152,000 to 220,000 light-years (depending on how diffuse outer stellar halos and edges are measured).
- Total Mass: Estimated around 800 billion to 1.2 trillion times the mass of the sun, comparable to the Milky Way.
- Star Count: Contains an estimated 1 trillion stars.
And this blog headline leads me to a simple, yet profound, conclusion:
Only God could create this.
Not happenstance.
But, in this context, you have a choice. Either believe it or don’t. That is your call.
