"The cosmos is all that is,or ever was or will be"
Looking at the grand scale of the cosmos helps us to understand how small mankind and earth is compared to the splendour of the heavens. Living in this world we sometimes become pre-occupied with ourselves and our surroundings , we become immune to appreciating the real wonder of the universe.
Looking around the net here are some amazing pictures that I have found of our cosmos.
The death of stars
This is an image captured by the hubble space telescope last week which shows the final moments of a star 4000 light years away from earth.
The explosion will last for 1000's of centuries before the star finishes giving out all of its stored gasses.
Our sun (also a star) will also enter its final stages in the far future, but we take comfort in the timescale involved. Our sun is excepted to die out in about 5 billion or 5,000,000,000 years.
Stellar Nursery (birth of stars)Yet another stunning image captured by the Hubble space telescope. This is the "Horsehead nubulae" situated 1500 light years from earth . A nebula is a stellar nursery , a vast cloud of gas and dust where under extreme temperatures new stars are born.
Our sun too must have been "born" in a nebula like this.
What's amazing is that when a star dies the gas and dust it leaves behind is accumulated by nebulae and used to form new stars as the aeons pass.
Galaxies
This is a picture of the galaxy M51 far,far away from us ,its almost 23 million light years away.
That means when we are looking at it ,we see it as it was 23 million years ago.
Galaxies are were stars and planets are cluster together. Our galaxy the milky way is a relatively smaller one , but it still has 400,000 stars (like our sun) and planets revolving it.
If you think thats amazing there is an estimating 100 billion galaxies(probably much more) out there , thats 100,000,000,000 galaxies!!!
I wonder if on any of those galaxies there are creatures like us , who are now looking at our galaxy and sharing the same thoughts we have.But if its just us in those billions and billions of planets , i think its an aweful waste of space ...
Home Sweet Home
Does that tiny dot look familiar ? Well it should thats where you are staying right now!
This picture was taken by the Voyager probe which is the most distant man made object in space. It was taken from 4,000,000,000 miles away before voyager left our solar system,and continued its journey onto the stars.
Commenting on this image, the astronomer Carl Sagan said, "We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."
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