Werner and Mary Braun: Do you ever feel small?

Published 10:34 pm Thursday, May 5, 2016

I must admit that I do, especially when life seems to spiral out of control.

After I retired I expanded my reading list to include astronomy and astrophysics. As I’ve read more, I’ve became amazed by the size of the universe, some of the structures that make it up, how it works and some of things that we don’t have a clue about.

An example is dark matter, which makes up 80 percent of all the matter in the universe. We can’t see dark matter or measure it with our most sophisticated scientific instruments. All in all, it can be very humbling and somewhat diminishing. Before we delve further into astronomy, let’s look a bit closer to home.

As of April 23, 2016, there are now very nearly 324 million people living in the United States versus the population of our planet, which is 7.4 billion persons. Scientists estimate that 107 billion humans have lived or are now living on Earth in total. Some simple math shows that 7 percent of all the humans that have inhabited Earth are living today. Individually, we are obviously a very small part of that huge number.

But let’s look beyond our beautiful blue and white orb floating in our solar system. However, to understand how big things are in our universe, let’s define something that we need to understand to put into perspective how big some of the elements that make up this universe we live in really are. The term is “solar mass” — one solar mass (weight) is the total weight of our sun. For a starting point, it would take approximately 333,000 Earths to equal the weight of the sun or more than a thousand Jupiters. Earth is really tiny compared to the sun.

But that’s nothing. Let’s look at neutron stars. Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars known in the universe. They result from the collapse of a massive star, resulting in a supernova and an orb that is seven miles in diameter (Dalton to Ringgold) and with the weight of twice the sun (two solar masses). Here’s another perspective of neutron stars. They are so dense that a matchbox containing neutron-star material would weigh five trillion tons!

Once again that’s nothing. If a star that collapses is large enough, it will create a black hole. A black hole is so heavy that not even light can escape its gravitational pull; hence, the name black hole.

The universe has been around for a long time, and has had many opportunities to create large, super-massive stars that live, die and become black holes. At the centers of galaxies those black holes have the opportunity to merge and build up. Over time, most galaxies acquire super-massive black holes as a result, including our own, which has one with a mass of some four million suns.

However, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is just an infant. Astronomers have observed the largest black hole yet discovered. It is a monster — 12 billion times the mass of our sun.

One last tidbit to contemplate: Earth is a Goldilocks plant that is home to 7.4 billion people. But this is one planet around one star. The universe contains 1 to the 23rd power of stars, that is, a one followed by 23 zeros. This begs the question: How can we be alone? The answer is it doesn’t matter. And on further consideration, I don’t feel small because in the entire universe, there is only one me and only one you. Pretty cool!

Werner and Mary Braun live in Dalton. He is the retired president of the Dalton-based Carpet and Rug Institute.