As a family with young children we often have interesting conversations around our house. Today, though, we had a conversation I loved. We studied Astronomy last year with the kids and my son, in particular, has fallen in love with outer space – along with most other science-related things.
Outer space came up again today. He was coloring a page with planets and stars on it and mentioned that Betelgeuse is so far away it might take us a few days in a space ship to get there. He was right. It is about 642.5 light years away from earth. I know science for some of us was a long time ago, so just for reference light travels 186000 miles per second. If you are doing the math with me, for us to travel to Betelgeuse from earth (if we went the speed of light) it would take us about 600 years. If we went a mere 25,000 miles per hour it would take us about 16 million years.
Here is a picture:
Here is an up-close view – wow!
I know, a lot of numbers and you are probably wondering why it even matters. Well, it mattered to my son earlier today. He thought it would be great to visit, but quickly came to the understanding that visiting was a little out of the question.
One thing we did remember, though, is that we serve a God who breaths stars – “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth” (Psalm 33:6). God made those stars by the words of His mouth – those stars we cannot even touch and even the ones we have yet to find. Amazing.
This caused some excitement in our house today because we started to think of the possibilities. Someday our Jesus would come back again – He could take us to see the stars! How cool is that? What an amazing God we serve and what awesome wonders He has created…and to think His most special creation was us. Very cool.
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