Abstract
How large is the universe? This is a very old question, and astronomers have been struggling with it for millennia. The geocentric theory posited that the cosmos came to an end just beyond the orbit of Saturn, but it was Copernicus and his heliocentric theory that greatly expanded the size of the known cosmos for the first time. Copernicus hypothesized that the stars were greatly distant when compared to the planets, and Giordano Bruno pushed this idea forward in 1600 with the many worlds hypothesis by claiming that each star in the sky might be a solar system of its own.
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Notes
- 1.
Galaxy collisions are by no means instantaneous events. Although Andromeda and Triangulum will begin to collide with the Milky Way in about 5 billion years, the actual collision event itself is expected to take at least 5 billion years to run to completion, resulting in a giant elliptical galaxy.
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Barth, D.E. (2022). Galaxies. In: Star Mentor: Hands-On Projects and Lessons in Observational Astronomy for Beginners. The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98771-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98771-8_11
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