The message is in the stars

By Ivan Morgan

A Work in Progress

Let’s hope the weather clears up for a few nights of stargazing. August for me is a month of letting go, relaxing, recharging. A good way to do that is to stargaze – enjoy the night sky. It’s very peaceful. You must get away from urban light, but that’s not the challenge here that it is in other parts of the world.

We have celestial events in August. I love the Perseids, a so-called meteor shower that’s actually the Earth passing through the debris trail of a comet. August 11- 13 is the best time, but it can be spectacular even after that. If you really want to see honest to God fireballs, this is for you.

Or on any clear night you can just lie on your back in a dark place and look up. If you are into constellations, there are books and websites that can help you out. Personally, I have always thought they were out-dated and kind of silly, made up by ancients with way too much time on their hands. Make up your own constellations. It’s more fun.

What you are looking at is our corner of the universe; and while you are staring at it, here are a few facts to boggle your mind and the minds of people who are gazing with you.

Our solar system is on one wing of our galaxy, which we call the Milky Way; a spiral galaxy of over 100 billion stars, like our sun, held together by gravity, the centre being a black hole with gravity so strong light cannot escape it. Speaking of light, a light year is the distance light travels in one of our years (299,792 kilometers per second). Our galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. (How far is that? You do the math, I hate math).

Ready for more silly numbers? Recent research indicates there are two trillion galaxies in what is known as the observable universe. That’s what we can see. Some say there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. Some say that’s bunk. You can google the arguments and boggle your brain further. (Too many numbers. I remind you I hate math.)

And as I am taking you on a boggle-a-thon, while you are staring at all this, another thing to remember is you are time travelling. Most of what you see is no longer there, as light from even close galaxies can take millions of years to reach your eyes. And they are moving away from us. You are looking at images older than our species. What you see is how they looked millions of years ago.

Now consider our planet is spinning on its axis at up to 1,674 kilometers per hour while travelling around the sun at 107,229 kilometers an hour, while our solar system moves around the Milky Way at roughly 828,000 kilometres per hour. The Milky Way galaxy itself travels through space at about 2.1 million kilometres per hour relative to the cosmic background.

Does all this overwhelming silliness mean anything?

To each their own, but it reminds me how important we are to each other, and how miraculous we all are. It reminds me that none of us are here for very long and we have only each other. To me it underscores how important it is we all care for each other.

We are here in the middle of a nothingness too vast to comprehend. We are very much on our own. If we don’t care for each other, nothing else will.

All that vastness we have managed to figure out. Wouldn’t it be great if we could figure out how to get along with each other?

Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com