Learning Artifact 1

I feel like I already had a general understanding of light years being distances and how to reason about them, but I enjoyed our class on them nonetheless.

I didn’t quite have the recent intuitition on how vast the universe really is. That idea that even the closest star is multiple light years away puts in perspective how large these distances in the universe are.

Something else that I already had an idea of, but not a strong intuition on, was how many stars and galaxies there are. It’s mind-blowing how many stars there are in each galaxy, and then that there’s multitudes of galaxies just in the space of a ball-point pen held up against the night sky.

The scale of the universe is one of those things that feels impossible to wrap your head around. I enjoyed this first class and the outdoor scale model we did.