RPM Challenge 2015 Part VI: Hymn For The Universe

Track 5 from Impossible Universe -- Hymn For The Universe

If you've read any of my previous posts about the Impossible Universe tracks, you've seen some pretty amazing things that we've discovered in this Universe we live in.

These are only a handful of the infinite wonders of the cosmos. Take a look at the image to the left, and the one at the bottom on the left. Almost all of those luminous blobs are galaxies.

2MASS Galaxy Catalog shows 1.5 million galaxies
near our own Milky Way.

In fact, there are about 1.5 million galaxies just in our local universe. The image to the right is an infrared scan of our "local universe." The center is our galaxy, the Milky Way. The blue-colored blobs are galaxies nearer to us, green ones are further out, and red ones are the furthest away from us. (1)

I say "local universe" because the Hubble telescope has been used to count and catalog galaxies in the "observable" universe, which is vastly larger than what astronomers call the local universe. Astronomers and astrophysicists have used the Hubble data to make an estimate of how many galaxies would be in the entire universe. Their number? More than 100 billion galaxies.

So how many stars in all those galaxies? Astronomers say that our galaxy has 300 billion stars. And, our galaxy is one of the larger ones in the universe. By measuring the luminosity of the observable galaxies, they estimate that there are 70 billion trillion stars. (2)

With so many galaxies that have so many stars, I find it hard to believe that Earth is the only place where life exists. There is life out there; I am convinced of it. The odds are pretty good, I think.

Hymn for the Universe is meant as an anthem for our universe; for all of the stunning, amazing, unbelievable, impossible things that we are discovering out there. I'm sure that we are just starting to scratch the surface of the magnitude of the universe, and I'm convinced we do not understand a billionth part of how all of these things work, how they came together, and what their (and our) fates will be.

Hymn for the Universe is also meant as a small and perhaps unworthy tribute to The Creator of all of these things.



Thanks to my friend, Darren Major, who wrote the chord progression used as the basis of this track.

(1) https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March04/Jarrett/Jarrett1.html
(2) http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-many-stars-are-there/