Basic HTML Version
by
Robert A. Ginskey
S
ince the dawn of history, man
has marveled at the mystery
and grandeur of the heavens.
On a clear night, our own galaxy,
the Milky Way, can be seen as a
star-studded ribbon circling the sky.
The familiar constellations- Orion,
the Pleiades, the Big Dipper- proba–
bly look the same to us as they did
to ancient civilizations long since
perished.
But what secrets lie hidden in the
celestial realm of outer space? And
what is man's place in the cosmic
scheme of things?
To the writers of the Bible, the
heavens were awesome testimony to
the Creator (Ps. 19: 1). According to
Job, it was God who spread out the
heavens; who made Arcturus,
Orion, tbe Pleiades, and the cham–
bers of the south (Job 9:8-9). "When
I consider thy heavens," mused
David, "the work of thy fingers, the
moon and the stars, which thou hast
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ordained; what is man, that thou art
mindful of him?" (Ps. 8:3-4.) In
New Testament times, the apostle
Paul expressed the same awe and
wonder (Heb. 2:6). Yet somehow, in
our hurried and harried twentieth–
century life, the heavens no longer
seem to inspire quite the same feel–
ing of reverence toward the Creator.
Probing the Cosmos
But consider the awesome size and
complexity of the cosmos that is re–
vealed by modern science. Our
earth is a massive sphere sorne 8000
miles in diameter; yet our star, the
sun, has a diameter 100 times larger
than the earth. Viewed from afar,
our solar system- the sun and nine
revolving planets- would appear as
a disk in space nearly eight thou–
sand million miles across. Already
such numbers stagger our imagina–
tion.
Perhaps we can better visualize
such incredible distances by an
analogy: If we compressed our solar
system so that our sun (which is ac–
tually over 800,000 miles in diame–
ter) was reduced to the size of a
quarter (one inch in diameter), then
Pluto, the most distant planet in our
solar system, would be the size of a
grain of sand located over 400 feet
away!
And the nearest star? Again on a
scale where our sun is the size of a
quarter. the nearest star, Alpha
Centauri, would be a similar object,
500 miles away! And in between
would be the vast emptiness of
space. Yet our sun and Alpha Cen–
tauri are only two of
lOO
thousand
million stars in the giant pinwheel
ofstars known as the Milk:y Way.
The Milky Way is so vast that
light- which can travel around
the world in the snap of a finger–
would take 100,000 years to cross
from one edge of our galaxy to the
other.
Such distances are nearly impos-
The
PLAIN TRUTH July 1977