14 DAY TRIAL // For many, observing the Cosmos is an awe-inspiring experience, or something that frightens them considerably. This is because the Universe is so vast that many people, some astronomers included, cannot stop thinking that a higher power must have been involved in creating it.
When looking at the vastness of our own galaxy exclusively, one is struck with its sheer dimensions. With two spiral arms, a supermassive black hole at its core, and a diameter of 100,000 light-years, the Milky Way stands among the Universe's giants.
It features several hundred billion stars spread over this great distance, but somehow bound through the force of gravity. In this cosmic mash-up, our Sun is just a spec of light, and a very small one at that.
On the other hand, the Milky Way is only one of the hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, so one cannot easily wrap his or her head around how big the whole thing is.
As such, many are inclined to fall back to spirituality, or religion, to seek and explain the vastness, grandeur, and also the very existence, of the Universe. According to priests at the Vatican Observatory, looking at the stars is equally as frightening as witnessing the Biblical Heavens.
VO astronomer Father Paul Pavel Gabor says that there are many people who get confounded, or depressed even, when brought to understand the true scale of things. The feeling of insignificance that they get can sometime be overwhelming, he explains.
“They find it quite awe-inspiring, but in the wrong way.When I show people pictures of the local cluster of galaxies, just to give them a sense of the scale of things, the reaction quite often is, "Oh dear. I'm completely insignificant, and I'm uncomfortable about this whole Universe thing',” Gabor says.
“Faith tells you that the universe is not something to intimidate you, but it is something given to you as a gift, by somebody who wants to give you something nice, something pretty,” he adds, quoted in an editorial on Space.
“So looking at those astronomy pictures, you can either feel that the glass is half full, and believe that you're really being given something here, or you can feel the glass is half empty and this is just frightening and you want to hide in your little rabbit hole somewhere,” Gabor explains.
But scientists say that the very mysterious nature of the Universe is what allows the idea of an omnipotent God to take hold of people's minds. Astrophysicist David Cline wrote in a recent issue of Scientific American that our lack of knowledge, our ignorance, is what makes us scared.
People are generally inclined to take a more spiritual view of things they don't understand. The same goes to the Universe, albeit to a larger extent, as there are many things left to discover about it.
But not all of us have the luxury to fall into this seducing trap, because then there would be no one left to actually carry out strict observations, defined theories based on them, and then provide explanations of the things around us.