Numbers and (a bit of) the Universe.

I like litening to a BBC programme and Podcast known as More or Less which checks on numbers to seee if they are correct. Or interesting.

Well the interesting number in the one I listened to today is rather a boring number, 3.

3 because the Scottish Astronomer Royal has seen the third interstellar object in out Solar system. This is a comet. It is interesting as it tells us something about what's going on in our galaxy outside our solar system.

It got me thinking about Galaxy. No, not the brand of chocolate made by Mars. And about the Milky Way. No, not that sweet either. The Milky Way is our friendly neighbourhood galaxy.

I know not a lot about astronomy, though I can tell the difference between a star and a Dreamliner heading for Heathrow, which are the bright bits I see from my balcony on a clear evening.

So now, some mind-boggling numbers

Turns out there are between 100 million and 100 trillion stars in a Galaxy. Seems the Milky Way is a big one and is at least 87,400 Light Years across. And a Light year, it turns out, is about 5.88 trillion miles. So the distance across our friendly neighbourhood galaxy is about a sextillion miles across. Mary Whitehouse is turning in her grave and whichever way you look at it, that is a lot of chocolate.

So how many of these galaxies are there for us to explore? Well at least 200 billion, and perhaps 200 Trillion.

If you remember there are at least 100 million stars in a Galaxy and at least 200 billion Galaxies it outs our local sun in a bit of perspective. I reckon that means it's one in at least 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So (sorry Mary) we are back to a sextillion suns. If its like ours there are a few planets orbiting these suns.

If that's not enough to keep God busy (if he exists, not my speciality). Especially that sextillion of suns is only in the bit of the universe that we can see.

I always knew it was big, but this is outrageous.

Makes me go all weak at the knees. Well, they were a bit weak before.