A Big Bang

Friends,

Amazing! This week scientists revealed that they have detected a super, supernova that is 100 times more powerful than "normal" supernovas (as if "normal" supernovas are not amazing enough). A supernova is the massive, destructive explosion which occurs when a star's energy runs it course and collapses in on itself. It is not unusual for stars go out with such a bang. This king of all exploding stars, SN2006gy, that blew itself to bits was an extremely rare giant in a galaxy 240 MILLION light years away. At its peak, it emitted more than 50 BILLION suns worth of light which shined 10 times brighter than even its own host galaxy for a period of time. If you love astronomy, this is so cool! It is truly remarkable that we can actually "see" these events at this point in time -- praise God for such technology. As I shared in my earlier blog on "light years" this baby blew up a long time ago -- and just during the past year people are getting to see the results. Most supernovas happen with stars several times the mass of our own sun; this one was about 150 times the mass of our sun. Scientists say that there are about a dozen of these type of super, massive stars in our own Milky Way galaxy -- which is not very many when you consider that there may be as many as 400 billion stars in our galaxy! The possibility of one of these stars exploding in our galaxy is extremely rare and it would be very unlikely that it would have an effect on us. Once again, this all helps us to realize the smallness of our existence in God's grand scheme of things and just how big is the universe. To close with an illustration, our planet, Earth, could be characterized by a grain of sand, whereas the known universe would be all of the sand on all of the beaches of the world. Mind boggling -- but perhaps just a small way (no pun intended) for us to appreciate the enormity of God's creation.

Don