SENTINEL WATCH February 23, 2004 Issue

The cosmos and 'Love's divine adventure'

By Laurance R. Doyle

According To Current Cosmology, in the time it takes to read this sentence, the universe has expanded by another million miles or so. "Unlimited horizons" might be a good way to describe such a universe.

It has only been over the past 170 years or so that astronomers have begun to realize how vast the stellar universe we live in is, as they first began to measure the distances to the nearest stars. This created an immense contrast. Compared with the view of ourselves as material, limited, and earthbound, the universe would seem too vast in space and time for us to be of any consequence whatsoever.

Our little Sun explodes the equivalent of 80 billion hydrogen bombs inside itself every second to bring its rays to our cheeks and feed the flowers. The sunshine you're getting today was made almost 10 million years ago (now, that's planning ahead!). But it took that long for it to get to the Sun's surface.