The Every Star Every Planet score is beautiful...

Damn, I love this thread...a beautiful place to escape from football and politics and soar through the universe every once in a while...

Nice to see only the best of what we are for a change, 'eh?...

Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second or 700 million miles an hour. For scale, the distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 239,000 miles. This seems pretty fast and indeed theory says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

The length of time it takes to go from:

Earth to Moon: 1.3 seconds

Earth to Sun: 8.3 minutes

Sun to Pluto: 5 hours 40 minutes

Our solar system to the nearest star(Alpha Centauri): 4.3 years

Across our galaxy: 100,000 years

To the Andromeda Galaxy: 2.5 million years

IC1101 Beefcake galaxy. The largest we've found.

http://imageshack.com/a/img838/3628/foez.png

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/UE8yHySiJ4A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Just how large is it? Prepare to have your mind blown, because this galaxy has a diameter of 6-million light-years and a mass of about 100-trillion stars. It is nearly 50x the size of our very own Milky Way galaxy and 2000x as massive. If our galaxy were to be replaced with this super-giant, it would swallow up both Magellanic clouds, the Andromeda galaxy, the Triangulum galaxy, and almost all the space in between. That is simply staggering.

http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/i...xy-ever-found/

All of these Hubble shots just blow my mind, so everything was created by the big bang... but what was out there before the big bang?

The "territory" for lack of a better word was there, I assume... so it was all just a big blank canvas before the bang? if so, what created the bang that caused all of this?... what creates INFINITY?

I think the possibility is great that our biology may keep us from ever being able to fathom the true answers to those questions.

The great thing is, its ok to say we don't know~

We don't know for sure. We may be on the other side of a collapsed black hole that created the big bang. No one knows.

Infinity is talked about a little in the article that I posted on the last page before this one. A "Steady state" where new matter is created and old matter joins stars so a balance is maintained. Again, no one knows for sure.

30 years ago the accepted astrophysics dogma was that black holes were not real. The way physics and astrophsics has advanced in the last year, I think its only going to be 10 years when before many theories we think now is thrown out.

We have no idea what dark matter is for crissakes.

That's the only thing that I can wrap my head around and it would explain all of the theories about multiple dimensions, other universes that somehow parallel/sit on top of our own, but that we somehow cant see/aren't aware of them.

What we see of the infinity of space is just one side of infinity, on the other side of a collapsed black hole as you say... I like that, our infinity is but one of many.

Just another reason for me to reject the idea of no higher, intelligent power than man.

Many scientists would say there's really no such thing as empty space. In turn, there would be no such thing as empty "Territory" for a universe to fill. Because the territory is also part of the universe. It's difficult to imagine, but it's possible that there was simply nothing. Not even blank space.

It's really difficult to imagine an outer edge of the universe. But then again, trying to imagine infinity might be even more difficult yet.

But isn't space pretty much the definition of infinity, how can there be an end to it, where, or how, would it end?

Not trying to snark, but its a pretty big conundrum, even guys like Hawking haven't wrapped their heads all the way around it yet.

It is shaped like a donut.

So you're saying there is a God?

Stop making me think.

I'm thinking more like a cruller or lacework style fritter.

An overlapping mess, yet each strand is its own.