I recently saw a post regarding the discovery of a new nebula by a hobbyist. I would like someone to explain how this is possible given the thousands of satellites we have.
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The volume of the Earth is about 1.1E21 m^3. There are great swaths of the Earth’s surface that haven’t been explored (think of much of the abysmal ocean plains). That is literally just barely scratching the surface of the Earth. We have ideas of what’s on the inside, but anyone who tells you we know everything about it are lying.
The volume of the observable universe is about 4E^80 m^3. This is a volume about 4E59 m^3 times larger than the volume of the Earth. 4E59 is a large number–if you think you understand how large this number is, then you do not understand how large this number is.
The fastest space probe not in orbit is Voyager 1. If it was heading for Proxima Centauri (our nearest neighbor) it’d take over 70,000 years to reach it. It’d take about 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way traveling at the speed of light (light is fast).
We suspect there are over 125 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Start counting. If it takes you 1 second for each number it’d take you almost 4000 years to finish (no eating, sleeping, or bathroom breaks!). Each galaxy has on average around 100 million stars. So counting stars instead will only take you a few trillion years.
TL/DR — Space is big.
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