Gods Sabbath

22

E NTERING INTO G OD ’ S S ABBATH R EST

this earth would be buried 476,729,050 kilometers (296,233,800 miles) beneath its surface. And our God is so powerful that He merely spoke it into existence. Such is the infinite capacity of the Source of all things. Yet Betelgeuse and Antares are relatively close stars. There are other solar systems in the universe, the size of which is so vast that the comparative smallness of our solar system be comes even more apparent. “An idea of the scale of the distan ces between stars was given in the early 19th century by the German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel. He found that the nearby star 61 Cygni was at a distance of about 3 parsecs, or about 600,000 times the distance from the earth to the sun. In 1917 the American astronomer Harlow Shapley estimated that the earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way, was about 100,000 par secs in diameter, thus providing the first indication of the Milky Way’s size ... The modern value for the size of the earth’s visi ble galaxy is roughly 30,000 parsecs (100,000 light-years) in di ameter. The Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort found that the sun takes approximately 250 million years to travel once around the center of our galaxy, and he thus was able to calcu late that the mass of the Milky Way is roughly 100 billion times the mass of the sun.” Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia , Infope dia 2.0, Article “Cosmology.” Such figures are beyond the grasp of our imagination, and yet our solar system is only a tiny speck in a universe filled with other galaxies, many of which are much larger than the Milky Way. These facts alone are enough to show how insignificantly small is our own planet earth. “Galaxies are generally not isolated in space but are often members of small or moderate-sized groups, which in turn form large clusters of galaxies. The earth’s galaxy is one of a small group of about 20 galaxies that astronomers call the Local Group. The earth’s galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are the two larg est members, each with a million million stars. The Large, Small, and Mini Magellanic Clouds are nearby satellite galaxies, but each is small and faint, with about 100 million stars. “The nearest cluster is the Virgo cluster; the Local Group is an outlying member of the cluster, which contains thousands of gal axies of many types....