6.3 days old
38.6 percent lit
I have gotten weary of people that play with the nature of Earth. So, let's begin to defend the idea there actually was a real beginning to the universe and Milky Way Galaxy. I think Paul Sutter is able to put it in words that all should be able to understand. The underlying FACT to his description is the speed of light. The speed of light is a law of nature. It is measurable and consistent.
The Earth is 4.543 billion (with a b) years old. It is not 8000 or so years old. Earth is ancient and the speed of light is a reliable method of proving it.
April 22, 2018
By Paul Sutter
...Because light takes time to travel (click here) from one place to another, we don't see stars and galaxies as they are now, but as they were thousands, millions or billions of years ago. That means that looking deeper into the universe is also looking deeper into the past. We see a lot of quasars in the distant cosmos, which means these objects were very common billions of years ago. But there are hardly any quasars in our local, up-to-date neighborhood. And they’re common enough in the far-away (that is, young) universe that we should see a lot more in our vicinity.
The simple conclusion: The universe was different in its past than it is today....
...We live in an expanding universe. On average, galaxies are getting farther away from all other galaxies. Sure, some small local collisions happen from leftover gravitational interactions, like how the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda in a few billion years. But at large scales, this simple, expansionary relationship holds true. This is what astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered in the early 20th century, soon after finding that "galaxies" were actually a thing....
The picture to the right above is an artists depiction of the Milky Way Galaxy. Not the universe, just one galaxy in the universe.
