Your World

​Does your world rap around yourself pretty tightly? Do you think that you are ‘all that plus a bowl of butter beans?’  Well, maybe you should look to the stars for a little reality (and soul searching.) Think about this.  The universe (the entire charted and uncharted region of outer space) is composed of galaxies.  These galaxies are huge clusters of stars (huge globs of radioactive energy) rotating around a black hole. Scientist estimate that there are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. Within each galaxy, there are billions of solar systems, a group of planets (huge globs of rock or ice) revolving around a star.  Our solar system has no particular name except that Earth, a planet, revolves around the Sun, a star.    Here are eight planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Our little solar system is located within one of these two trillion galaxies.  Scientist predict that our Milky Way galaxy contains about 100 billion stars (suns.) The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy type so it has arms sort of like an octopus with its arms rotating clockwise around a center. Our Sun does not lie near the center of our Galaxy.  The Sun is located near the outward tip of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.  This makes Earth about 28,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way, our galactic home.  The ancients thought that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the whole of the known universe.  They only saw the shining stars within our galaxy with the naked eye or with crude telescopes. And our Earth, so they thought, was the center of this vast group of stars, all of which were rotating around us on Earth.  So when you decide to set yourself free, free from the warped little world you have created for yourself, go outside one starry night to confirm that you are but a grain of sand on the beaches of this world.