I am Alpha and Omega,
the beginning and the end,
the first and the last.
Revelation 22:13
"It has long been common to read of its estimated diameter as about
100,000 light-years (ly)—lately sometimes up to 160,000 ly.
100,000 ly
is already massive—c. 590 quadrillion
miles, or 950 followed by fifteen zeroes.
It means that if one could
travel at the speed of light c (under physical laws, no object can travel faster than this), it would take 100,000 years to go from one side to the other.
The new study estimates the size of the Galaxy’s disc as being double this—200,000 ly across. And yet this is less than a pinprick in the vast expanse of the universe as a whole.
A common skeptical objection concerns how light could have reached us
from distant galaxies in under 6,000 years. It’s important to remember
that a light-year measures distance, not time.
And the same scientific
principles that dictate c as the universe’s speed limit—Einsteinian relativity—also alert us to the experimentally-proven reality of time dilation when velocity and/or gravitational strength changes.
This raises interesting possibilities of how there was ample ‘time’
for the most distant light to reach Earth in a short time without any
logical contradictions.
---For a good summary of creationist thinking on
this, see Chapter 5 of The Creation Answers Book (creation.com/starlight)." CMI
