God's Amazing Universe with Dr. Doug Walker Phd

The Mission of Creation Fellowship and Introduction to Dr. Douglas Walker

And we are recording now and we are also headed for Facebook live stream so I can get started. I'm Terry Camerizell here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee. Welcome to our sixth season of CFS Virtually There.

We love to learn about our creator God and believe that the Bible when read properly disproves Darwinian evolution. We've been meeting on this online platform since May of 2020. Since meeting online, we've been blessed with over 100 individual speakers.

Our mission statement is 1 Peter 3 .15, always be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within you. You can find most of our past presentations by visiting tinyurl .com forward slash CFS archives.

C like creation, F like fellowship, S like Santee and the word archives. Dr. Douglas Walker is an engineer and researcher. He has obtained a PhD in astronomy with studies at both James Cook University and the University of Canterbury.

Some of our members met Doug last September on their creation trip to South Africa. So we have been blessed to have him speak for us and also become friends with him. And tonight he's back to share with us some more of his knowledge of the universe.

I'm going to turn it over to you now, Doug.

Okay.

Thank you, Terri. So, first of all, I just want to say thank you for everybody coming tonight. Listen to this talk. This is a really a passion of my heart. It's been since I was a little child. So and God has put me, brought me to an amazing journey to get here.

So that's probably talk about that another time, but thank you for coming. So so I titled this talk, God's Amazing Universe, because hopefully as I take you through what I'm going to speak about the next 30 or 45 minutes or whatever, you'll see that the universe is incredibly amazing, incredibly large.

It's just unbelievable how beautiful and amazing it really is. So I'm hoping that some of that passion for that God's beauty and his universe will spill over into you as we go through this talk. Can I go forward?

Hang on. There we go.

Okay.

Measuring the Vast Distances of Space

So two parts, what I want to talk about tonight. So part one is I just want to take us through a quick trip through starting with here we are on Earth and take us through space and time, not time, space all the way out to the largest structures of the universe.

So, you know, first talked about some distances in space so we can try to grapple with that. And just briefly look at a solar system, I did a talk I did back last fall was on the solar system. So I'm going to spend a lot of time on that.

But now I'm going to go out some of that to our stellar neighborhood. Then we go into our Milky Way galaxy and then outside of Milky Way and finally to the very largest portions of the universe. So that'll be the first part of it.

And the second part is just like, okay, so let's let's look at some evidence, some scientific evidence for both an evolving universe and for a created universe.

Right.

And then we'll conclude here.

So.

All right.

So part one, just a trip through the starting of the solar system moving out. So distances in space, you know, we really don't I don't think I can't myself. We really don't have a can grasp the distances that we're talking about in space.

OK.

And so I kind of start off this. I teach an introductory astronomy course online now with Yuppie Pie College, which is north of here in Prescott, Arizona. And I've taught some in class courses, too. And I always try to start off with the very first part of the semester with this kind of portion here saying, OK, let's look to see just can we even start to grasp what the distances look like in space?

OK, so let's talk about let's go back and relate to something we can relate to and then we'll try to expand it out. So let's take a simple example. You want to drive and I'm here in Phoenix. I want to go over to San Francisco or I take a trip.

That's like 751 miles if you go Google map or whatever it is, right. And I want to say, OK, we're going to get my new I don't know if that's a Jaguar there on the right or not. My new very expensive car travel at 70 miles an hour.

I mean, speed limits in Arizona are 75. I think California is 70. So we'll just say 70 miles an hour and we're not going to stop anywhere. Right. And anything is these examples because, you know, that'll just complicate the example.

More.

So nonstop, how long does it take you to drive from Phoenix to San Francisco? Ten hours and 45 minutes. Well, that's a pretty good drive, right? It's about six hours from here to L .A. So, you know, that's a pretty good drive, right?

OK, well, let's say you want to turn around and drive to the moon. Well, about the average distance from the Earth to the moon average is not on a perfectly circular orbit. It's about two hundred fifty one thousand miles.

So driving at that same speed is going to take you 150 days nonstop. Like, OK, now you're approaching half a year, OK, to drive to the moon and the Apollo astronauts, you know, got there in a little over three days.

So they were traveling quite a bit faster than you are in your car. Right. But let's say the example, if you're going to drive to Mars now, the Mars average difference from the Earth and it varies quite a bit in its orbit because you were both orbiting the sun about one hundred forty million miles.

So that's going to take you about two hundred twenty eight years. OK, the sun's closer on the average, about ninety three million miles, about ninety three million miles from us. One hundred fifty one years to drive the sun, Jupiter further out in the solar system.

Right. We're talking about, you know, observing Jupiter and its moons, you know, with a small telescope, much like Steve's Valkyrie, you can see Jupiter's, you can see the bands on the planet. It's a very large planet and you can see the moons.

If you watch it night after night, you can actually see the moon and the moons. That's what Galileo first observed and and, you know, hundreds of years ago. But if you're going to drive to Jupiter, it's going to take you five hundred ninety five years.

Pluto, which I still consider a planet, outer edges of our solar system, it's going to take you five millennium, the nearest star, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, 40 ,000 millennia. OK, so obviously you're not going to drive anywhere, right?

And so how do astronomers measure distances in space? We move away from the miles because that's not going to get us, you know, the numbers would be just ridiculously large. Right. So we do what they call a light year.

And that's a it's not a time, but it's a distance light travels in one year. Light's traveling approximately one hundred eighty six, actually I should put one hundred eighty six, three hundred miles per second.

OK, if you take that times the number of seconds in a year, so light travels about five point eighty eight trillion miles a year. OK, so if you can grab your head around that, you know, so obviously we'll never get anywhere, you know, driving anywhere.

Right. Spacecraft even takes years to get out to the other planets. Right. So now let's look if you're traveling at the speed of light. Nevertheless, the Millennium Falcon, right, they traveled multiple times the speed of light.

Right. They said they could get to the Milky Way Center in about an hour or so. OK, whatever. But the speed of light now we can get to the moon in one point three seconds. What took you? One hundred fifty days of drive it now and get there.

One point three seconds. Eight point three minutes to get to the sun. Still going to take you two thousand years. Get out of the Milky Way and down to bottom down there. It says it's going to take 90 billion years.

Get the edge of the observable universe. OK, so I found that little clip and there's another little clip on the side. There's kind of the same thing. Right. So Earth's the moon. One point two eight seconds.

Yeah. OK, that's that's OK. They're twelve point five two minutes to Mars. OK. Nearest star. They've got Proxima and Tauri. It's actually a dual system. So four point two four light years. There is a cluster there.

We go to the Milky Way Center. Twenty six thousand years. Get to the center of the Milky Way. Andromeda, the closest galaxy to us. And you can see that with your naked eye to get out where it's really dark.

You know where to look. And it's a fuzzy little spot in the sky. Even in a telescope, it's a fuzzy little spot. It's five point or two point five. Three million light years, million light years. Edge of the observable universe, they've got is forty six point six billion.

So I think it's very interesting that this one clip on the left got 90 billion years to the edge of the observable universe. And these guys got forty six point six billion years. OK, so I'm starting off by saying there's a lot of discrepancy and just all this literature you're talking and seeing, right?

Here's something I pulled out when I was a kid. You know, I had this little booklet science series, Man and Missiles. And I remember, you know, reading that thing multiple times or whatever. And, you know, I'd lost it years ago.

But then I found a copy of it on sale on eBay. So I bought it. Right. Because I remember the last page of this is stuck in my mind. Pluto. So this is when Pluto was a planet. Pluto, gateway to the stars.

Always kind of like that. Right. So went back and looked at last page again. It's like and even back then, right down to where I circled at the red box. Star travel is a gigantic problem. So, yes, they even recognize it, you know, way back.

In the mid 20th century that, yeah, it's a large problem to try to get to these stars. Right. OK, we're going to leave the solar system quickly here. Upper left, there's a solar system now showing you the planets.

OK, down on the right is the solar system. When I was a kid back there, say they got Pluto out there. Right. So that's why I still kind of favor Pluto. And there's a story about how Pluto got demoted.

We can talk about that at some other time you'd like, which I think was kind of underhandedly. But so there's the planets of the solar system. Size comparison of the planets. Again, we're I'm trying to give you a appreciation for, you know, we're talking about size and distances of just astronomical.

Right. Things. So at the top size comparison of the planet. So there's a sun. OK. Mercury's a little dot you can't see. Right. You barely see Earth and Venus. They're almost the same size. Mars a little bit smaller.

Jupiter. OK, but it's not nearly as big as the sun. Right. Largest planet in the solar system. There's Saturn with the magnificent rings. And we go to Uranus and Neptune, the outer gaseous Jovan planets out there.

They're smaller than than Jupiter or Saturn. So so that's size comparison. The bottom one there shows you a distance scale comparison. Right. So now this is set up on what they call, you see down at the bottom, AU's here.

OK. So AU stands for astronomical unit. So what they've done 100 years ago, they set the scale of the distance from the Earth to the sun as one AU. And so now the scale to bottom is showing you on that reference scale.

See Earth over here with the little blue dot. It should be right at one AU. OK. And then I guess that's the asteroid belt. That must be Mars must be one point five. Oh, no, that's kilometers. OK, sorry, sorry.

So one AU is the same thing as one point five. Either the eight eighth power kilometers. OK. And Jupiter's out here. They don't have it on here, but it's about five point eight AU. So what that says is about five times the distance from the sun.

The Earth is Saturn's at 10 AU.

So so look at that.

So Saturn is twice the distance from the sun that Jupiter is. Uranus now is twice the distance from the sun at point. Well, not twice. Yeah, 20. Yeah. 20 AU versus 10 AU for Saturn. And then not quite twice.

We go to 30 AU's for Neptune and Pluto's way out there. 40 astronomical units out from the sun. So size wise, it shows you that we are on a very, very small little planet in our solar system, right? Compared to this organic sun there.

And we are very close into the sun compared to all the other planets outside here, rest of the solar system. We visited all these outer planets here. I've skipped over like Venus and Mercury and Mars.

That's, you know, entered what they call the terrestrial planets. These are the outer gas giants or Jovian planets. And so we've taken photos, flown spacecraft, flybys, all of them. Voyager 2, Voyager 1 actually went past Jupiter, I think, in 78 and they left the solar system.

So the Voyager 2, they planned it very, very nicely. They visited Jupiter in 79, Saturn in 81, and they flew it past Uranus in 86. So all the planets kind of lined up. They could just do this billiard ball bouncing effect to the outer planets, Neptune in 89.

OK, then in a separate mission, we sent this thing called New Horizons out to Pluto and it arrived there in 2014. That's a picture of the surface of Pluto. So I don't think we ever got any close up to Pluto's.

And these were all flybys. They didn't go into orbit around the planets. They were just flybys. And now the New Horizons, I think, is moving through what they call the Kuiper Belt, looking at some other outer objects.

And so now we've sent probes in orbit around Saturn and Jupiter since then. I haven't seen any to go in orbit around Uranus or Neptune. So some of that's in the planning stages. All right, now we're going to leave the solar system, right?

And we're going to look out what they call the, quote, stellar neighborhood. So these are our neighbors, you know, in your neighborhood, right? So closest stars Alpha Centauri, you can see the sun there in the center.

I don't know if you can see my little cursor flying around a lot. Sun's in the center there. There's Alpha Centauri and see Proxima Centauri is a double star system. So they are our closest ones, right?

And so then you have these other stars. All these were are within, you know, 30 light years in a sphere with the Earth at the center, OK? So here's a scale up here showing 10 light years. So it must be 10 and then 30 is the diameter all the way across.

So they're saying within the sphere, there's 71 stars within 30 light years of the sun, OK, and out of these 71 stars, there's only 49 star systems. 22 of these are double type star systems called binary systems and 15 are triple type systems.

They got three stars, you know, of a complicated orbital mechanics around the way they orbit each other themselves. So that's our stellar neighborhood. OK, now we go out further. Now we leave the neighborhood.

We go into the Milky Way galaxy. OK, so now the center of the screen here. Here's, you know, the Milky Way, the way we mapped it out. And, you know, if you go back 100 years ago, right? Early, early 1900s or whatever, they were just discovering and mapping out what the Milky Way looked like.

You know, the late 1800s, they didn't really realize that we lived in this thing called, you know, this galaxy. They didn't really have any resolution on Andromeda. They couldn't figure out what that was.

And so it took a while for them to kind of figure out and map what was going on, because, you know, we're in the midst of this thing, right? But there's the sun and we're in this. So there's arms in the Milky Way, because it's it's rotating.

OK, so there's these, you know, it's like a pinwheel, fireworks pinwheel, right? So, you know, the stars are being drug along with it as it rotates. The sun's in this thing. One of the spurs of the Perseus arm called the Orion Spur.

OK, so there we are in the middle, upper right. There's just a photo of the Milky Way galaxy taken at night with some type of camera system. So if you go out where it's really dark and you look up, you can see that band.

It needs to be dark, right? And so when you, you know, if you do go out someplace campy or wherever it's dark, you need to let your eyes adjust for at least 30 minutes when you first go outside, get dark adapted.

But, you know, you can see the band of the Milky Way across the sky. And it's, you know, it's really beautiful, right? Now, the photos take all those dark sloshes across the middle of it there. Well, that's actually gas and stuff that's obscuring between our view of the central part of the galaxy.

So they say the size, you know, estimate size of the Milky Way is anywhere from 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 light years in diameter. And I'm like, you know, that's a pretty good error bar on that, right? You know, a hundred to two, I mean.

And the number of stars they say, you know, estimate anywhere from 100 to 400 billion. I read somewhere that it could be an estimate of up to a trillion stars and are milking in only our Milky Way galaxy.

I think these estimates are like wildly all over the place. You would think they would be more refined than that. And maybe they are in some of the literature. I just haven't found it. So, OK, let's see if I can go forward now.

There we go. OK, so we're still inside the Milky Way. So what are some of the, I'm not going to talk about these strange objects inside the Milky Way. Well, everybody's probably heard of black holes, right?

You know, so there was a movie back there. And I think it was 79 or eight or something like that. You know, Disney with the black holes, the spacecraft circling around a black hole, right? And black holes were first theorized, I believe, in the late 50s, early 60s.

And Stephen Hawking, if you know who he was, he has or had Lou Gehrig's disease and he was in a wheelchair. He's a brilliant guy, right? He first did some of the first calculations and first theorized, you know, what black holes really were.

So it took us a long time. We finally got an image of this black hole. And so a black hole is a collapsed star that the mass of the star was so large. All right, let me back up and kind of start here.

So a star goes through, you know, we think a normal cycle, right? We look at the physics of the stars. They say, OK, a star goes through this life cycle. Once it uses all its hydrogen fuel up, it starts burning heavier elements in a periodic chart.

And finally, it burns, it burns all the elements up. It can't sustain nuclear fusion anymore. And one of two things will either happen, either the size, the mass of the star is not large enough. It'll collapse down on itself.

It becomes a high density neutron star, which I'll talk about in just a minute. It could actually go supernova, which would explode. And, you know, it produces a tremendous amount of energy. Or if the mass is large enough, and I think it's like three and a half or four solar masses the size of the sun, when it starts collapsing down on itself because gravity collapsed the star on itself, and if it's a mass not large enough, and you have the repulsive of the neutrons and stuff in the atomic elements of the mass being produced down, it counterbalanced the gravity.

And so it becomes either a white dwarf or a neutron star. If the mass is large enough, it can't overcome that gravity. So it just keeps collapsing down into this dimensionless point or a black hole. And it's called a black hole because the escape velocity beyond a certain point called the event horizon on a black hole is greater than the speed of light.

So light cannot even escape inside this horizon of this black hole. And so it took us years, but there's finally an image of the black hole. And it's at the center of this galaxy, M87, which is a picture up in the upper right there.

So M87 is a Messier object number 87. Charles Messier was a French pastor. And I believe it's French. Yeah, French pastor. And a couple of years ago, I need to look up the exact dates. And he has, you know, a crew telescope back then.

He was looking for trying to discover new comets. So he's a pastor, but he loved astronomy. He was trying to discover new comets, you know, like Edwin Haley and stuff. And so he would come across these objects in the sky and fuzzy blob like, I've seen that thing before, right?

So it's like, I'm going to start making a catalog thing. So we start cataloging M1 all the way through M110, I believe. So now they're called the Messier catalog list. So this one here was number 87 that he cataloged in this list.

So astronomers have finally got an image of a black hole inside that inside that galaxy. OK, so I heard here for a second. This thing's called a Heisberg-Russell diagram, HR diagram. Astronomers use this to try to plot out what the life sequences of stars.

Now, we all know the universe is only a few thousand years old. So it was created with all this appearance of age. That's why the stars can be looking at different agency cycles. But if a star went through its life cycle and the sun's right.

Where is our sun? That should be right, right there. Well, if you if you could see my cursor, it's right in the middle where it says lifetime, 10 to the 10 years. So they're saying that's how long the nuclear fuel inside the sun will last.

And then when the sun uses all its fuel, it's not large enough. It'll probably become a red giant. And it branches off to the right and says, see those giants up there? There's other stars that we know about that are in that stage.

Aldebaran, Prolix, Arcturus up there. And you can see those stars in the sky. They can become super giants above that, like Betelgeuse and Terry's. And and then a star will burn itself out and go down to the lower left and what they call white dwarfs.

So so this is kind of a life path of what astronomers and physicists think stars go through. Now, this is actually a plot of surface temperatures of stars and luminosity. So it's not really an evolutionary cycle.

It's just a plot of the luminosity that, you know, versus the temperature of the star itself. But then astronomers say it goes along the cycle. So so so we talked so I wanted to show you that because as stars go off and they collapse back down, some of these things become very dense and are called neutron stars, which are basically made of neutrons out of the atom.

Right. So, you know, basic atom, you know, it's all these subatomic particles now with basic atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons. These things are leftover cores from exploded stars, from supernovas. And some of the densest objects in the universe.

These things are called neutron stars and they can add different flavors of them. Magnetar, pulsar, or you have a magnetar plus a pulsar. So pulsars are very interesting, weird objects. And see if you can make this thing here work.

Will it come up? You guys see that flashing in front of you there? So this is an illustration of a pulsar and its magnetic field. There's energy being sent off along its axis, along its magnetic field.

And so it happens to be oriented just so that the that energy flash is shown to us. Right. And so we can watch this thing and you can see that the intensity of the light increases and decreases. So that's what that thing is doing there.

So. And so these things can rotate rapidly anywhere from a few seconds into milliseconds. And they've started talking about using pulsars that they've found that rotate extremely fast. And it's using them as timing devices, ultra, ultra fast clocks, weird objects, other strange objects inside the Milky Way galaxy.

There's a thing called fast radio burst in radio astronomy. So we haven't talked about this. There's, you know, different areas of the spectrum with astronomy, right? So optical astronomy is what, you know, what you see optically visible, right?

And that's what I am as an optical astronomer. There's radio astronomers, right, who are receiving all these radio waves from all these objects in the sky. And so radio astronomers use these big, huge, large telescopes because the wavelengths are a lot larger than the optical wavelengths.

And they can map out objects in the sky with radio. And so this fast radio burst is a pulse ranging from just a fraction of a millisecond. OK, to an ultra fast radio burst, you know, that's an ultra fast radio burst, up to three seconds.

So, so they're caused by some kind of high energy astrophysical process, not yet well understood. So as you go through here, you'll see, hey, you know, astronomers don't understand a lot of this stuff, do you?

You're like, no, there's still a lot of them. There's still a lot of unknowns out there. So these things are called fast radio burses. The other ones called this, this thing's a tabby star. And they still don't understand this thing.

Now, this is a it's about 1500 light years away. All right. We know how to gauge distances now. It's a 12th magnitude star, which you can't see with your naked eye because you can only see about six magnitudes down to the naked eye.

But with a small telescope, probably, you know, Sting's telescope, you just probably could probably pick up the star. And it dims randomly by anywhere from five to twenty two percent for days at a time.

They don't know why. They're still trying to study it. And, you know, irregular fluctuations were detected in 2015. So it's not very long ago, right? Other objects, quasars, always like quasars. Quasar is really a contraction of quasar stellar radio source.

These were first identified in the late 50s and early 60s as sources of high intensity radio emission. And when they first started detecting these things, they couldn't optically. They couldn't find out what was going on.

They couldn't see anything, right? Finally, they got the telescope systems, you know, advanced enough to identify the images of visible wavelengths and they resembled distinct starlight points of light.

So and it wasn't until we got, you know, Hubble Telescope up there that they found out that, oh, these things are actually looks like quasars in the center of galaxies. And I remember as I was a kid, I used to watch this old show called The Outer Limits, you know, and there was this one show on there.

The guy was talking about these quasars. We, you know, source of energy. We have no clue about what they are, what they're doing now. So we know more about them now.

So but.

It's a tremendous amount of energy. Here's a black hole, I don't know about this guy until I started putting this talk together, called Kong 618. And this is supposedly the size of a black hole. OK, so now I've got the solar system right inside of it, right?

Remember, we went to the solar system. It's going to take you, what, 5000 years of drive to Pluto. So it fits inside the solar system. Well, look at the size of this thing. So that supposedly is the size of this black hole.

10 .4 billion light years away. OK, long ways there, right? So again, they think this is, oh, they say it's a black hole that's producing a tremendous amount of energy. And you can actually, you know, if you've got a, you know, nice enough telescope system, you can probably image this thing because there's an image in the lower left down there taken by this thing called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

And so they're not using super large telescopes. I mean, they're good sized telescopes, but, you know, you can we can actually image that thing. So other black holes, it's inside the galaxy. OK, so now I'm going to we're going to leave the galaxy.

OK, we're going to go call the local group of galaxies, right? We talked about Andromeda. So Andromeda M31. So now Messier found that guy before he found M87, right? So, you know, it's like, what, 2 .4 million light years away.

And the lower left there is a sea star image of M31 that I took, again, from my backyard here in Phoenix. So that's 4 .2 .4 million light years away. There's companion galaxies around that. M33 there is a spiral type galaxy.

You can see right below that red line. I haven't been able to image M33 yet. I really want to do that one. So so there's other companion smaller galaxies around M31. So this is what they call our local group of galaxies, right?

All right. So now we're going to go a little bit further. Now we're doing the local group of, you know, of super galaxies, or actually what they're called. So now we have this thing called the Virgo Supercluster.

OK, so images on the right. We'll talk about those first. So on the top one there, there's over 700 galaxies appear in this image of the Virgo Cluster. So while those little dots there are galaxies, OK, identified are not stars or look like stars, but they're galaxies containing who knows how many stars each.

Right. And then the bottom there is M81 and M82, which, again, Messier M81 and Messier 82. So those are little blobs you could actually find with your smaller telescopes. So that's a very nice image of both of those in the same image.

So then if you go to the left, they were looking at that diagram of the Virgo Supercluster. Right. So the local galactic group, which we just got to talking about on the previous slides, they're red in the middle.

Right. So that's our local group. Milky Way's in the middle of that. So now these are clusters of galaxies. OK. And there's not a scale here. We go out millions of light years away. There's clusters of galaxies.

Right. So there's the big, large blob there on the right. There's the Virgo Cluster. So this whole thing is called the Virgo Supercluster because the Virgo Cluster's in there. Right. Upper right, the Virgo Two Groupings.

And then you have the Leo Groups at the bottom and it just goes on. So this is, you know, a grouping of superclusters. All right. Now we're going even further. If you can even imagine it. Right. So now we're looking at what they call, you know, a large scale structure of the universe.

So if we go map all these clusters of galaxies, not individual galaxies, but these clusters of galaxies and map it on the very largest scale we can with our largest telescope, we get something that looks like this.

So Milky Way, all the way back down there in the center, you can't even see it. Right. So there's the Virgo Cluster, you know, that we just got to seeing on the previous slide. You know that, you know, that kind of structure kind of moves up to the upper right there.

Thing called NGC 5419.

That's a specific group of,.

I believe a specific group of galaxies over there. NGC stands for New Galactic Catalog. OK. And sometimes the Messier objects, I mean, they also have an NGC number, but you'll just see most of the time if they is M something, if they have that.

So looking around this thing, you know, toward the bottom is a Hydra Cluster, Cancer Cluster, all the way down at the bottom. The yellow areas and that little key to the right are huge voids that we look out in the space and we really don't find anything.

We don't find any stars, we don't find any galaxies. Well, we don't find any. Tremendous distances of just nothing but void. Now, I say that you go back about 20 years, I guess, when the Hubble Space Telescope, well, there's a scale to top 100 million light years.

Go back about 20 years, the Hubble Space Telescope. There was this void where they couldn't see any stars. And I have this really old book somewhere in boxes around here somewhere. It was around the turn of the early 1900s.

It was a astronomy book and it talked about sections of the sky that were just void. There was nothing there, just black areas, right? And so the guy who ran the, who was responsible for the Hubble Space Telescope tasking and all that, he had some discretionary time, director's discretionary time.

So they turned the Hubble Telescope to one of these void areas, right? And it's called the Hubble Deep Fields. You can go and Google that after this. And they just imaged it for hours and hours. And they look at the image.

And then this area they thought was like void and nothing there. It was full of galaxies. They were just all shocked, like it's just things full of galaxies. So all these void areas, maybe there is a bunch of stuff that we just can't see it currently.

So that thing's called a large scale structure of the universe. So here it is, you know. Also, these are some surveys done mapping that out. You can see kind of structures and stuff in there. When they start talking about these tremendous distances, they jump from light years to red shifts because, you know, expanding universe, things further away, they're shifted toward the red end of the spectrum with spectroscopy.

So they'll use red shifts instead of light years. A lot of times they describe the distances. So if you look at the universe on a very large scale, this has this structure to it. And it's got these void areas where it's just like nothing out there.

So again, I mean, it's hard to even try to imagine something like that. Right. I want to take just a second and go on a side note here. So I'm not a professional astronomer. I don't, as Terry said, I was an engineer career and stuff like that.

I'm doing astronomy work now following some of the work I did earlier on my doctorate with some other astronomers and stuff. And they take imageries of clusters and stuff. So this is a cluster I did a bunch of work on.

It's in Southern Hemisphere. It's called Omega Centauri, and it contains over 10 million stars. OK, so, you know, you can see it is actually visible. It's at magnitude 3 .9. So it is visible to the observers, you know, in the Southern Hemisphere.

We can't see it up here. It's about 18 ,000 light years away, about 150 light years in diameter. OK, so what I do is I go in and I'm looking at some of these specific stars. So this is an image of the cluster that this telescope took that I get the imagery from.