Hop, Skip and Jump to the Edge of the Universe! -- With your Smart Telescope

Most astronomy enthusiasts are familiar with the Charles and Ray Eames' film, "Powers of Ten," in which the animation zooms out a factor of ten every ten seconds. In the film, as you might recall, there are periods of activity interspersed with long periods of inactivity. This is because the different "objects" of the Universe only undergo qualitative changes on scales of about 10,000. (Fair warning here. My beautiful and multi-talented wife thinks 10,000 is a boring subject. But you be the judge.)

I find it wonderful to imagine my smart telescope observing sessions as hops, skips and jumps of Powers of 10 Thousand -- more properly a giant quintuple jump. It's how I get my head around the size and structures of space. Every object here is something you can observe with a smart telescope, like the eVscope, Vespera, DWARF II, Seestar S50, etc, pretty easily. (This ability to go really deep is indeed a challenge when we want to interpret our telescope views with the public. I’ll try to deal with that problem in a coming blog entry.)

Here is a list of my 5 leaps of 10,000:

1. Moon's Orbital Diameter ~10,000 times farther than a nearby city here on Earth some 80km away. Chicago, IL to Kenosha, WI, say.

2. Neptune's Orbit ~ 10,000 times larger than the Moon's Orbit. Sorry Pluto, you're too little to play in this game.

3. Distance to brightest star in the sky: Sirius ~ 10,000 times the diameter of the Solar System.

4. Distance to M54, the most distant globular in the Messier Catalog, which is close to the size scale of our Milky Way Galaxy ~10,000 times the distance to Sirius.

5. Size Scale of our Super Cluster of Galaxies Laniakea ~ 10,000 times the size scale of the Milky Way Galaxy.

So, what can I observe at the largest jump, number 5? Well, that would be at a distance of about 850 million light years. We can easily get to 500 million light years to see galaxies in the Hercules Cluster of Galaxies. NGC 6041 is a giant elliptical galaxy, 473 million light years away and about an arc minute in size. One can observer farther without too much trouble if one looks at quasars, but they will just be quasi-stellar, i.e. points of light.

Speaking of great distances in space…. I’m sometimes asked about interstellar travel. Just this past weekend a close friend of the family who is an avid science fiction fan asked me about the Fermi Paradox and interstellar travel in our future. Well, I know that Fermi was thinking about nuclear rockets that might reach a fraction of the speed of light when he rose the question of interstellar travel. But, suppose for right now we just think about the “slow boat” chemical rockets we know very well, like the Saturn V and apply this new Powers of 10^4 knowledge.

The Saturn V took 3 days to get to the Moon. At the same speed it would take 10,000 times longer to get to Neptune, or 82 years! That’s a full lifetime. How about plowing on to Sirius? That would be then 820,000 years!! Rewind the clock on Earth that far and there weren’t even members of our species, Homo Sapiens, hanging around. In fact the earliest member of the hominid genus dates back to that magnitude of time.

Another jump in 10,000 at Saturn V speed would take 8.2 billion years!!! We’d never make it outside of our galaxy! If you rewound the Earth on this time scale you would need to go scouting for the previous generation of stars that forged our earthly elements.

Okay, I can hear you say that we may probably engineer faster rockets someday. Well, I'm not sure ones that are much, much faster than the Saturn V will be available any time soon when one considers the current records of SpaceX and Boeing.

What does all this mean? What it means is that I really, really won’t talk with you for long about interstellar travel or visits from alien spacecraft if, in fact, they even exist. I am quite happy using my own mind to travel the cosmos, however.

So, then what if one is really brave and wants to imagine hurling one’s mind another factor of 10 thousand beyond Step 5 above? Well, hold on to your Nikes! -- that takes you out to what's called the Particle Diameter of the Universe -- about as far as we can envision at this age of spacetime. Whew!

My smart telescopes can't get me that far yet, but I take comfort in knowing that I'm showered by ten trillion photons per second per square centimeter from the cosmic microwave background when I am outside observing — I just wish those photons would keep the mosquitos away…. ;-)

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Credit: This exercise reminds me also of the track and field event called the Triple Jump. In this case I'd call it the Quintuple Jump. At the top of this entry is a picture of Christian Taylor, the gold medal winner in the 2016 Rio Olympics.