The image at the top of this page is a picture of the Sombrero Galaxy, so named because of its similarity to the broad-rimmed, high-topped Mexican hat. The Sombrero is a spiral galaxy, as is our own Milky Way galaxy. It lies in the constellation Virgo, some thirty million light-years (i.e., 180 quintillion miles!) from the Milky Way. The galaxy is approximately 50,000 light-years across, making it about half the size of the Milky Way in terms of their respective diameters. It is between 10 to 12 billion years old, and contains several hundred billion stars. These numbers are staggeringly large. To put them in perspective, consider the following:
- A stack of 1 billion one-dollar bills, laid flat, one on top of the other, would reach a height of approximately 90 miles.
- If you had 1 billion dollars to spend, and you spent it at a rate of $100/hour, it would take 1,140 years to spend it all.
One may ask what all of this has to do with theology. The answer is that it begins to give us an idea of the size of the universe. However, it only “begins” to do that because the numbers that describe the distance between the Sombrero and the Milky Way are so large that we are not at all able to comprehend them. The best we can do is represent them with mathematical symbols. The situation becomes even more incomprehensible when we consider that the Sombrero is relatively close to the Milky Way. The “edge” of the universe is more than 400 times farther away from the Milky Way than the Sombrero Galaxy. The universe would be mind-boggling if it consisted only of these two galaxies, but the reality is that the universe consists of approximately 100 billion galaxies, all of them more or less like the Sombrero and the Milky Way. We find a commentary on these astronomical facts in the Book of Wisdom: “From the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (Wis 13:5).
Theology and Sanity 