Effulgent | Radiant points From which Light rays emit |
U
nder the stars at night the Universe's immense magnitude is implicated. There is a timeless fascination with relating the immediate human environment with the pulsating cosmos as gravity and radiation manifest. Each of these moving visible points of light could be energy emitted from a single enormous luminous ball of plasma. Or each shining point could be an entire galaxy - a massive, gravitationally bound system consisting of many stars and stellar remnants. There are almost certainly more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which is comprised of all cosmic matter currently discernible from Earth. These objects are detectable because their radiation has had time to reach us since the beginning of the cosmological expansion which occurred 13.9 billion years ago. Assuming the universe is isotropic, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is approximately equal in all directions. Therefore the observable universe is a spherical volume centered on the observer, regardless of its actual shape. Of course it is reasonable to assume there is much more beyond the observable.
“The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
