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Voyager 1 is the longest flight detector from the farthest distance from the earth by humans so far. It has flown more than 23 billion kilometers, but it can only become space garbage in the end.
But fortunately, Voyager 1 brought back countless wonderful photos, and the last batch of images it took made people think deeply: It turns out that humans are so small?
Time dimension
From distant Ancient Greek html years ago, people began to explore the universe. Even more than 3,000 years ago, the ancients had already had the concept of the universe.
But the more humans detect the vastness of the universe, the more they will feel their own insignificance. We can analyze this in detail from the time dimension and material perspective.
scientists detected that the universe began to explode from singularity 13.8 billion years ago, and then continued to expand until its current prosperity.
However, its super-large scale also exceeds people's imagination. The famous astronomer Carl Sagan once proposed the concept of the universe calendar.
He condensed the 13.8 billion years of cosmic calendar into one year, so a second of mankind is equivalent to 437.5 years of cosmic history. The 24 hours of human beings are equivalent to 37.8 million years of the universe.
So from the perspective of time span, human understanding of time is really small and unremarkable in front of the universe. Moreover, in terms of the timetable of the universe, the birth of human beings and the earth's civilization is relatively short-lived.
For example, the universe is condensed into a natural year, and the universe explodes from the singularity on January 1, which also means that the universe is officially born.
Then on September 1, the solar system was born and the earth was born on the second day.
From September 2 to December 16, Earth Cambrian life explosion . It was during this period that this concept of the species of animals we know today gradually took shape.
Around December 30, since the earth experienced five mass extinctions, the former Earth overlord dinosaurs slowly withdrew from the stage of history in a harsh living environment. And human civilization finally began its own performance.
But from a time point of view, the birth of earth civilization and human life is on the time scale that is relatively backward in the universe. It was only after December that the dinosaurs left the stage to humans, and the capable people appeared at the end of December. Our ancestors, , Homo sapiens , have the chance to make a brilliant debut.
However, in one hour of the universe, the evolution of basic human civilization has flashed quickly. And now our brilliant modern life actually only occupied 12 seconds in the universe.
It seems that many things are so small that they only have a blink of an eye to understand the birth and evolution of the universe and earth civilization from the span of time.
Matter angle
Then we look at the contrasting relationship between the universe and the earth from the perspective of matter. In fact, as early as September 1977, humans had already launched an unmanned outer solar system space probe, called Voyager 1.
Although Voyager 1 weighs only 815 kilograms, its small body has great energy. It has visited Jupiter Saturn... and has also taken a series of high-definition photos about astronomy.
For example, in 1979, Voyager 1 was transmitted to Earth Command about the Jupiter system. In 1980, it took clear photos of the Saturn system.
, but unfortunately, in 1980, when Voyager 1 was carrying out a mission close to Enceladus 6, it was affected by additional gravity, which eventually caused the spacecraft to deviate from the channel. In other words, its next mission to explore planets is likely to face huge difficulties.
means that if it is planned to exhaust all its energy by 2025, as long as it is not affected by additional gravity, it is likely to fly over the edge of the solar system and enter interstellar space.
But unfortunately, the mission of Voyager 1 has been terminated. It stopped operating the plasma system in 2007 and the second year it stopped experimenting on planetary radio astronomy.
Until 2020, Voyager 1 will completely shut down scientific instruments. Scientists predict that after 2025, it will not have enough power to supply any single instrument and will even lose contact with Earth Command altogether.
However, Voyager 1 still fulfilled its mission. After flying 23 billion kilometers away from the earth, it also used its last efforts to take a series of photos for humans. However, after these images were transmitted back to the earth, they were once again thought-provoking.
When this picture appears in front of our eyes, many people may feel that it is blurry, or even feel that its pixels are not high. In fact, it was taken in 1977, and the earth is in this astronomical photo. It is not the final image scientists have obtained through digital synthesis.
Let’s take a closer look at the Earth in this picture only has 0.12 pixels. It is surrounded by vast universe energy. Each planet and star has its own established orbit and mission. But in comparison, the earth seems so small.
In February 1990, Voyager 1, which was rushing towards the center of Milky Way galaxy, received a mission from the Earth Command when it was 6.4 billion kilometers away from the Earth.
It once again took family photos of several major stars in the solar system, although this time people can objectively observe the position between the Earth and other stars in the solar system. But it’s a pity that the earth also appears dull and even ordinary in the solar system.
observable universe
In fact, the earth is not at the center of the solar system, but when humans study the history of the universe, they have always focused on the earth.
After hundreds of years of exploration by scientists, we finally discovered that there is a Milky Way outside the solar system, and we are distributed on the cantilever of the Milky Way with the sun.
Although for the earth and humans, stars like the sun appear extremely important and brilliant. But it's a pity that stars of the same magnitude as the Sun seem ordinary in the universe, even in the Milky Way there are tens of thousands of stars of the same magnitude as the Sun.
scientists predict that they have at least 150 billion.
And although the range diameter of the Milky Way may continue to expand, other physical changes will occur when it reaches a certain critical point, according to the current exploration results, the diameter of the Milky Way is also between 100,000 and 180,000 light-years.
Although Voyager 1 is currently the farthest probe launched by humans from the earth, it has not really entered interstellar space.
Surprisingly, there are galaxy groups outside the Milky Way. In other words, galaxies of the same magnitude as the Milky Way are also very common in this galaxy group. Scientists predict that there are at least 50 galaxies of the same magnitude as the Milky Way group.
The diameter of this galaxy cluster exceeds at least 10 million light years, but this galaxy cluster is not the largest galaxy cluster .
Because there is Virgo super cluster in addition to it, there are at least 100 galaxy groups of the same magnitude as this galaxy.
and so on, there are larger galaxy clusters in addition to the Virgo supercluster. It has taken thousands of years for humans to study these things.
But unfortunately, the range of the universe we are exploring is still a 93 billion light-year spherical space explored externally with the Earth as the center point.
But this does not represent the true appearance of the universe, that is, what we currently think of is just a cosmic state that humans can observe.
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