Earlier this month, a team of researchers led by astronomer Julianne Dalcanton released what is the most detailed images of the Andromeda galaxy taken to date. Even though the image does not cover all of Andromeda, it shows around 100 million stars. Andromeda is over 200,000 light years in diameter and around 2.5 million light years away. Compared with the short times and distances with which we are familiar, these numbers are unfathomably large, yet when compared with a universe that is nearly fourteen thousand million years old, and over ninety thousand million light years across.
Earlier, I commented on one abysmally uninformed layperson's attempt to explain away this evidence by sententiously intoning that all the stars in the universe could be crammed close to the Earth. Of course, such an argument betrays monumental ignorance of even the rudiments of astronomy, and ignores the fact that placing billions of galaxies tens of thousands of light years in diameter around (or ludicrously inside) a sphere 6000 light years in radius is an argument that is not even wrong:
