Our Place in the Universe
Looking up into the sky at night, it's hard to imagine that all those beautiful twinkling lights we see are really stars and plants that are millions and millions even billions of miles away.
But believe it or not, all of those stars can be found within our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. Outside the edges of the Milky Way are perhaps a hundred billion possibly with solar systems just like our own revolving around some of them. Astronomers have special names for the distances. Sizes an numbers that help them understand and explain the Universe. One, for example, s an Astronomical Unit (or Au, for short) which is a measure of 93,000,000 miles the distance from Earth to the Sun. Astronomers tell us it is 270,000 Aus to the next closest star or 4.2 light years away. Did you remember that a light year is six million, million miles away? You're probably getting a good idea by now why even scientists have a hard time comprehending the vastness of the Universe.
FastCounter by LinkExchange
