This semester, I had some flexibility in my schedule.
I decided that, for one of my last classes at Fredonia, I would take astronomy for a natural science credit, as well as for the opportunity to broaden my knowledge for the next time I go stargazing. Who doesn’t want to learn more about our galaxy?
I was recently going over my astronomy notes from the beginning of the class to start reviewing for the final exam. When I flipped my notebook open to the first page, I found what I had written on one of the first lines a bit striking.
It read, “Universe: the total of space, time, matter and energy. Where have we been, where are we headed?”
As a senior looking toward the end of my college career at Fredonia, I remember that line resonating with me back in January. I had only just begun looking at job postings, but I still felt like I had plenty of time before I needed to get serious. Graduation wasn’t until May, right?
If only I could go back and tell everyone where we were headed.
I don’t want to sit here and write about how much it sucks that my college career — along with thousands of other graduating students’ — was cut short. Don’t get me wrong, it does suck. But over the past few weeks, I’ve found that, for me personally, dwelling on that fact has been counterproductive.
Instead, I’ll talk about some things that I’ve learned in my astronomy class. Before I continue, it may be important to note that I am not an expert on astronomy or even a science major. I’m just a 21-year-old soon-to-be college graduate trying to make sense of it all.
Our Earth was formed about 4.54 billion years ago. This has caused quite a bit of dispute, and many people might agree that it was probably a huge mistake.
Still, here we are.
We are the third planet in a solar system of eight. (Dr. Dunham and the astronomy community are adamant that Pluto is a dwarf planet. If you want to debate, take it up with them, not me. I’m just as disappointed as you are.) We are the fourth biggest planet in our solar system, and scientists are still discussing whether or not our planet was the one on which life originally formed. Evidently, our ancestors may have been from Mars. How they got here — 33.9 million miles away — is a different discussion, but scientists agree that Earth is, overall, the better planet for sustaining life. So, if they were originally on the red planet, it’s a good thing they made the trip over.
Our solar system is located within the Orion Arm, which is a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
The Orion Arm is about 10,000 lightyears in length (about 5.8786254 x1016miles), but the Milky Way itself is 100,000 to 150,000 lightyears in diameter (5.87863 x 1017to 8.817938 x 1017miles).
The Milky Way is one of around 100 billion known galaxies in the Universe. And it’s on the move. In fact, we and the Andromeda Galaxy are moving toward one another at about 250,500 miles per hour. We will collide, but not until four billion years from now, so don’t let it keep you up at night. Since galaxies are mostly empty space, our planet would not be hugely affected by this merger. Our Sun is going to expand into its red giant phase well before we get to that point, so human life will be a mere memory for Earth, anyway.
Oh, and the diameter of the Andromeda Galaxy? It’s almost double that of ours at around 220,000 lightyears.
Interestingly, no pictures of our galaxy currently exist. In 1977, the Voyager probes were launched so that we could learn more about our galaxy and the outer solar system. They are just now leaving the solar system, so those pictures will not exist for a long time, but you can track the Voyagers’ progress here.
You may be wondering, does all of this have a point?
We are living in a country where, as of the time of my writing this, there are 840,625 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 46,996 deaths according to the updated stats here. Schools and businesses everywhere have been closed and millions are currently practicing social distancing. Lives have been thrown completely off the rails, and there is conflicting information about how the United States will reopen and when.
So, does all of this have a point? A better question might be, does there have to be one?
We are on a little piece of rock flying through space only to merge with another giant object in the end, and even though that won’t end human life, the Sun, a giant asteroid or humans themselves very well might.
Yes, it would have been nice to have a normal last semester. I would have loved a traditional graduation. And I was robbed of so many more nights, spending time with my best friends and complaining about all of the things I took for granted before all of this happened.
But when I look at everything in the grand scheme of the Universe, it all seems so small.
Coronavirus may have disrupted this fragment of my life, but that’s what it did for all 328.2 million people in the U.S., and that’s just our own country. Still, it’s hopefully just a few months out of what I plan to be a really great existence.
I guess I’d just rather focus on the magnificence of living life on this tiny planet than on the things that are out of my control, at least for a few minutes out of the day.
“The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson