© 1979 Dan Massey
© 2005 Urantia Association of Spain
Retrieved from http://www.urantology.org
In UB 15:3.1 we are told that “the vast Milky Way starry system represents the central nucleus of Orvonton…”. Therefore, there must be a part of Orvonton that is not in the Milky Way. We are told that included in this reference are “globular clusters, star clouds, spiral and other nebulae…”.
First, therefore, the authors of The Book use “Milky Way” to refer to a visual phenomenon of light in the sky. This is the original meaning of the term galaxy. In recent years, with the growing dominance of Hubble’s theory that spiral nebulae are extragalactic bodies, astronomers have stopped classifying “spiral nebulae” as part of the Milky Way, and they are assumed to be located very far away. (Of course, many are located elsewhere in the sky.)
In recent years, radio astronomy has been applied to map our Galaxy. It has been found to resemble a type of spiral nebula, about 30,000 light-years in radius, centered on a brilliant radio source in the constellation Sagittarius. This description is generally consistent with the expected size and center of our minor sector, Ensa, on whose central worlds exist “the vast reservoirs of physical controllers…” (UB 29:4.15). In UB 15:3.5 we are told that “the rotational center of your minor sector is situated far away in the enormous and dense star cloud of Sagittarius, around which your local universe and its associated creations all move, and from opposite sides of the vast Sagittarius subgalactic system you may observe two great streams of star clouds emerging in stupendous stellar coils.” These streams have been observed and mapped. Conventional astronomy associates them with the “spiral arms of our galaxy.”
Ensa is one-thousandth of Orvonton, making it one-tenth of its radius and one-tenth of Orvonton’s thickness (cubic volume varies as the cube of the change in linear dimension). If Ensa is 30,000 light-years in radius, then Orvonton is about 300,000 light-years in radius. In UB 32:2.11 we are told that it is 250,000 light-years from the outermost inhabited world of Orvonton to Uversa at the center of the superuniverse.
There are, in fact, thousands of objects the size of the spiral nebula called the Milky Way in the sky. There are 1,000 in Orvonton, and an equal number in each of the other superuniverses. In UB 12:2.3 we are told that we will soon see “no less than 375 million new galaxies in the remote reaches of outer space.” The most intensive search for galaxies made to date suggests that there are about 10 million galaxies visible out to 2.8 billion light-years (see “The Clustering of Galaxies”, Scientific American, November 1977, p. 76, for more on galaxy inventories and estimated distributions, but some of the inferences may not be correct).
If the Milky Way nominally contains 100 trillion suns, this is not inconsistent with the idea that it corresponds to Ensa, with 1 trillion inhabited planets.
The terms “nebula” and “galaxy” seem destined to cause confusion. When humans began cataloging the fuzzy patches they could see in the sky with the naked eye and simple telescopes, they were called “nebulae,” or “clouds” in Latin. The Milky Way, on the other hand, was visually unique and took the specific name “galaxy,” from the Greek word for “milk.” (I’m not sure the Greeks were the ones who named it that.) These were simple observable facts, just as “angina” was originally “chest pain.” Like “angina,” the meanings associated with words evolve with the growth of human information about the world around them.
Eventually, improved telescopes clarified that some of these nebulae were made of individual stars, while others could not be resolved into stars. Those that appeared to contain stars had a certain range of regular structures, ranging from globular to spiral, so it was assumed that all objects with these shapes in the sky were made of many stars, whether the individual stars could be seen or not. Since the largest and best-known diffuse patch of stars already had the specific name “galaxy” associated with it, this name was taken as the generic name for all diffuse patches that were also made of stars, or related to one of the shapes from globular to spiral. These later became galaxies, while the remaining nebulae remained undifferentiated as “nebulae.”
Hubble drew a famous diagram classifying regular galaxies into ten groups (regular meaning in the globular-spiral range). Based on a clever association of the redshift in the spectrum with the luminosity of certain variable stars of supposedly standard brightness (Cepheid variables), Hubble founded a school of thought in cosmology that dominates astronomy today. He announced that galaxies (in general) were extragalactic (outside the Milky Way). Of course, he believed he had been quite accurate. It turned out, however, that not all “galaxies” lay outside the local region of space. In particular, Hubble and many of his followers systematically ignored the effects of the Milky Way’s galactic mass on the propagation of light, which was predictable from the general theory of relativity.
Recent discoveries of quasars and other unusual objects have raised serious questions about the general applicability of Hubble’s discoveries to understanding cosmological issues. These objects appear to be moving away from us at speeds approaching the speed of light. This seems highly unlikely, and recent work is beginning to provide us with the theoretical basis for a partial understanding of how the redshift arises from non-cosmological sources. The evidence suggests that many of the “spiral nebulae” identified by Hubble as extragalactic are indeed so; however, those near or within the Milky Way may not be extragalactic. The effect of the Milky Way’s mass is to redshift the observed light. This mimics the effect of a high recessional velocity from a very distant galaxy.
There are other effects that confound our attempt to locate galaxies in outer space using spectroscopic observations.
A zone of empty space separates the superuniverses from the first outer space level, and I speculate that some empty zone must exist between the superuniverses. In UB 15:3.1 we are told, “Practically all of the starry realms visible to the naked eye on Urantia belong to the seventh section of the grand universe….” Clearly there are some that do not, but not many. These exceptions probably include some galaxies in outer space. They may also include parts of the sixth and first superuniverses, but it would be difficult to be sure. We would have to see something curious about 90 degrees above the plane of the Milky Way in the direction of Sagittarius. I don’t know what we might find. The other superuniverses may be too far away to see (or not, of course).