A beam of light traveling over 650 million miles per hour would take over 100,000 years just to cross the Milky Way. But our galaxy is only one among many billions in the known universe. Four examples illustrate how big our universe is.

A. Paper stack model.
   :1. Imagine that the thickness of a sheet of paper represents the distance from the earth to the sun (some 93 million miles).
   2. To represent the distance from the earth to the nearest star we would need a 71–foot–high stack of paper.
   3. To cover the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy would require a 310–mile–high stack.
   4. To reach the edge of the known universe would demand a stack of paper 31 million miles high.

B. Orange and grain of sand model.
   1. Here an orange would represent the sun.
   2. A grain of sand is the earth, circling the orange at a distance of 30 feet.    3. Pluto (the most remote satellite in our solar system) is another grain of sand, circling the orange ten city blocks away.    4. Alpha Centauri (the nearest star) is 1,300 miles away from the orange.

C. Hollow sun illustration.
   1. If the sun were hollow, 1.3 million earths could fit inside.
   2. A star named Antares (if hollow) could hold 64 million of our suns.
   3. In the constellation of Hercules, there is a star which could contain 100 million of Antares.
   4. The largest known star, Epsilon, could easily swallow up several million stars the size of the one in Hercules!

D. The relative speed illustration.
   1. Earth is traveling around its own axis at 1,000 mph.
   2. It moves around the sun at 67,000 mph.
   3. It is carried by the sun across our galaxy at a speed of 64,000 mph.
   4. It moves in orbit around our galaxy at 481,000 mph.
   5. It travels through space at 1,350,000 mph.
   6. Every 24 hours we cover 57,360,000 miles.
   7. Each year we travel 20,936,400,000 miles across empty space.

All the above is, of course, but a feeble attempt to illustrate the magnitude of space and of a universe which contains as many stars as there are grains of sand on all the seashores of the world. Furthermore, in Psalm 147:4 (also Isa 40:26), we are told that God has both numbered and named each star.