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This site is currently
undergoing major reconstruction!
Apologies if any links may appear to have changed, but hopefully the new layout should be
much easier to navigate, and if you look around I'm sure you can still find what you were looking for. Apart from this page,
any of your old bookmarks should still work, and refer to the old site.
In the meantime, some interesting facts
- Man appeared on this planet about 2,000,000 years ago.
- Age of the universe: approx 13,700,000,000 years, or
6,850 times as old as the human race.
- There are approximately 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the observable universe.
- The
nearest one to ours, Andromeda, is 2,500,000 light years away.
- That means the light that we can see now from our nearest
galactic neighbour set out before the human race existed.
- Our Galaxy
- has approx 300,000,000,000 stars
- its
oldest stars are 13,600,000,000 years old - very nearly as old as the universe itself.
- it is approx 360,000 light
years across, including the galactic halo, so from the centre of our galaxy to its edge is about 14% of the way to Andromeda.
- it
rotates roughly once every 237,000,000 years.
- so the galaxy has rotated very roughly 57 times since
its oldest stars formed.
- Our solar system
- is about 26,000 light years from galactic centre.
- has
done 20-25 orbits of the galaxy since it was formed 4,600,000,000 years ago
- life on earth began shortly afterwards
about 4,000,000,000 years ago so earth has done some 16 orbits of the galaxy since life began, and life on earth is about
3/10 as old as the universe itself.
- one galactic rotation ago earth was in the Jurassic age at the start of the dinosaurs.
- the
solar system has orbited roughly 2 degrees around the galaxy since the advent of humans.
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