© 2020 Troy R. Bishop
© 2020 Jan Herca, traducción y comentarios
© 2020 Urantia Association of Spain
A galaxy is an enormous group of stars, planets, nebulae, and other celestial bodies traveling as a unit through the realms of space. The Urantia Book has much to say about the structure of our galaxy, not all of it in accordance with current astronomical knowledge. Since the writing of The Urantia Book more than fifty years ago, science has reached agreement on some originally discordant points.
The Urantia Book teaches that at creation there are exactly seven inhabited galaxies, referred to as superuniverses[1]. The seven superuniverses circle one after the other around the Isle of Paradise[2], the center of all things, in a great ellipse resting upon the plane of creation[3]. Surrounding the space level of the superuniverses, quite outside but still on the plane of creation, are the outer levels of space, four concentric rings of developing energy: the future universes in creation[4].
¶ Notions about galaxies
Science describes the galaxy as: 1) a central protruding nucleus of indeterminate radius surrounded by 2) an elliptical galactic plane about fifty thousand light-years in radius and several hundred light-years thick, which is surrounded on its own by 3) a spherical halo fifteen thousand light-years in radius consisting of a light-sprinkled collection of luminous bodies. Returning to The Urantia Book, the galaxy is described as a vast plane, an elongated, circular grouping of bodies whose number decreases outward from the main plane of our material universe[5], a description that might fit the current and changing picture of science. Many of the luminous bodies visible to the naked eye are in our galaxy, say both astronomy and The Urantia Book[6].
The first disagreement concerns the Milky Way, a vast disk of stars visible edge-on in the night sky as a thick white line. To astronomers, the Milky Way is the galaxy; to The Urantia Book, the Milky Way is the central core of the galaxy.[7] The galaxy rotates about its center, says astronomy and The Urantia Book. Astronomy places this center about 30,000 light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, from the central bulge. According to The Urantia Book, it is 200,000 light-years away from us (from our system capital), somewhere in the central plane of the Milky Way.[8]
Fifty thousand light-years is the distance from the center of the galaxy to its outermost edge, according to astronomers. The Urantia Book says the actual distance is two hundred fifty thousand light-years (and it could be more). This is the distance from the galactic center to the outermost system of inhabited worlds, a distance which The Urantia Book says will increase as creation continues: the galaxy is still growing.
¶ The Sagittarius Checkpoint
Ten enormous physical systems called major sectors rotating around the galactic center—a great cluster of suns—constitute the galaxy, according to The Urantia Book. (It would appear, from the flattening of the galaxy, that these orbits would be parallel to the galactic plane.) Each major sector consists of one hundred minor sectors orbiting the center of its respective major sector, each minor sector consisting of exactly one hundred local universes—star clouds, descended from one or more nebulae—orbiting the center of the minor sector.[9] Above the local universe level, administrative units coincide with physical systems; at the local universe level and below, an administrative unit may comprise several physical systems.[10] Administratively, a local universe has one hundred constellations, a constellation one hundred local systems, and a local system as many as one thousand inhabited or habitable planets, not counting planets established in “light and life.”[11]
Physically, our planet rests midway within one of the arms of the original nebula that gave rise to it. Delving deeper into physical concepts, our planet orbits the Sun, which orbits the center of the original nebula, which orbits the center of the local universe, which orbits the center of the minor sector, which orbits the center of the major sector, which orbits Paradise, which is the center of all things. [12] These multiple motions, says The Urantia Book, are a source of confusion for our planetary astronomers. [13]
The constellation Sagittarius contains an important astronomical center, according to both current astronomy and The Urantia Book, but with very different conclusions. Current astronomy says that the entire galaxy is centered on, and rotates around, a point located 30,000 light-years from Urantia in the direction of Sagittarius. The Urantia Book, however, says that the center in Sagittarius is the center of our minor sector, the orbital point of the one hundred local universes in our minor sector. [14] (As previously mentioned, The Urantia Book places the center of the galaxy about 200,000 light-years from Urantia.) A misunderstanding of the significance of the rotation point in Sagittarius must be a source of profound distortions in astronomy’s picture of the galaxy. Theoretically, both points of view could agree, in terms of direction only, if the galactic center and the center of the minor sector happened to be in temporal alignment with respect to our observing position.
¶ Measuring distances
The four methods currently used for measuring astronomical distances are observation of the parallax of the proper motion of nearby objects, comparison of apparent luminosity and spectral type, observation of Cepheid variables, and observation of the Doppler frequency shift to deduce radial velocity.
The Cepheid variable method is accurate, says The Urantia Book, but only out to about a million light-years.[15] Used primarily to measure distances to distant galaxies, this method will introduce errors into astronomical measurements and theories. Astronomy may not be realizing the potential accuracy of this method even at small scales. Using the Cepheid variable method, astronomers calculate the distance to the Andromeda galaxy as 2.7 million light-years, where The Urantia Book says it takes light from this galaxy almost a million years to reach us—another way (for our understanding) of saying that Andromeda is less than a million light-years away.[16] Another major difficulty in comparing The Urantia Book’s astronomical figures with those of astronomy is the impossibility of obtaining definitive figures from astronomy. On Earth, a distance measured as one kilometer will always remain approximately one kilometer. But astronomy has calculated the distance to Andromeda, for example, as follows: in 1907 as 19 light-years using stellar parallax[17]; in 1911 as a minimum of 1,600 light-years by new observations[18]; in the 1920s as 800,000 light-years by Cepheid variables[19]; and in the 1950s as 2.7 million light-years[20] by rescaling Cepheid variables to suit astronomers’ expectations. Tomorrow’s figures are yet to come.
The Doppler technique, which determines the radial velocity of a luminous object by its apparent color shift due to motion (more violet for approaching objects, more red for receding objects), is given good treatment in The Urantia Book, but only when used on objects within the superuniverse level. The Urantia Book says that this method is seriously flawed when applied to objects in the outer space regions for several reasons, most importantly the rotation of the outer space rings (in alternating directions between successive rings), which can cause the erroneous impression that bodies on the outer space levels are traveling through space at fantastically high speeds. [21] No more detailed explanation is given, but one might infer from this that the rotating space on the outer space levels drags the bodies on these levels along with it, making it appear as if these bodies are traveling through space at tremendous speeds, rather than traveling with space (see the reference to de Sitter space concepts below). The Urantia Book refers to space as a positive reality; particular nascent forces, of which energy and matter are interwoven[22].
Through redshift, astronomers have observed these apparent (and initially receding) velocities of objects in the levels of outer space. This has led some to the idea of the Big Bang, an initial explosion that supposedly occurred when all matter (or prematter) in existence was concentrated into a small ball. The results of this explosion, according to the Big Bang theory, are the galaxies, on a headlong journey away from one another and from the site of the explosion. Some astronomers have gone further, envisioning a future of slowing expansion of the cosmos, reversal of direction and change of velocity back to the point of the original explosion, and a final compaction of all creation back into a basketball-sized grave. All worlds, all hopes, dreams, and possibilities of all living creatures in space and time, crushed. This is incorrect, according to The Urantia Book, which speaks of a breathing of space, a gentle expansion and contraction of space itself, in a two-billion-year cycle of gentle motion without interfering with the continuation of life or the development of the universe.[23] The idea that space itself is expanding was suggested in 1917 by the German astronomer Willen de Sitter in a dynamic version of Einstein’s static, curved universe. In the de Sitter universe the curvature of space is constantly decreasing (light would travel in an expanding spiral), resulting in an expansion of space and of the apparent motion of objects at rest in space. In effect, motion with space but not through space (see the explanation of the red shift below).
¶ Developments
Dr. Bart J. Bok, an authority on the Milky Way, has recently described a new view of the Milky Way, where the Milky Way includes a new component, the corona, a domain of invisible matter (perhaps dust and gas) that is much larger than the previously accepted radius of fifty thousand light-years. [24] This concept begins to approximate in some ways the description of the galaxy in The Urantia Book; but it also redefines the term Milky Way to designate the entire galaxy, a possible source of future confusion for readers of The Urantia Book, which teaches that the Milky Way (the old definition) is only the core of the galaxy. Readers of The Urantia Book would do well to replace this ambiguous term with two terms in their future references: for example, the Visible Milky Way or the Original Milky Way (the old meaning, as used in The Urantia Book) in contrast to the Milky Way Galaxy (the new meaning, which is now being accepted by science).
When The Urantia Book was written in 1934, the revelators said that improved observing devices would soon reveal many new objects and expand our ideas of the size of the galaxy. [25] This is now happening. They also indicated that objects now thought to be outside the galaxy would be recognized as being within the galaxy. [26] They flatly contradicted the astronomy of that time by saying that the Magellanic Cloud is a part of our galaxy (using their familiar phraseology about improvements in modern scientific knowledge in language skillfully handled to be acceptable both before and after the new scientific discoveries.) [27] It wasn’t until 1974 that astronomers began to wonder whether the galaxy might be larger than previously thought, and Jaan Einasto of Estonia pushed the idea that the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are a part of our galaxy. [28]
Now, nearly fifty years after The Urantia Book was written, Dr. Bok writes about astronomers’ new view of the galaxy (as initially proposed by Einasto), saying that the galaxy includes “the two small nearby galaxies called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and a number of dwarf spheroid galaxies, of which seven are now known.”
One of the dwarf spheroid galaxies he writes about is located 450,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. Another, the Carina dwarf galaxy, is thought to be 325,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way.[29] This is a substantial change from the fifty thousand light-years that astronomers used to judge The Urantia Book at the time it was written.
(Note: Could the seven dwarf spheroid galaxies mentioned above be connected to the ten major sectors of the galaxy? The Urantia Book says that at the time of its writing astronomers had identified approximately eight of the ten major sectors of the galaxy[30], but it does not indicate whether these had been recognized as part of our galaxy or not, a remote possibility in view of the dismissal of the galaxy’s size at that time. We were told that the major sectors would be recognized as enormous, reasonably symmetrical masses of stars.)
¶ About the differences
The Urantia Book is a spiritual revelation, whose spiritual teachings and presentations of the history and destiny of the universe should never be found in error. Its scientific statements, however, are in terms of the knowledge of the people who originally received it. The authors of The Urantia Book warn us of these things:
Mankind should understand that we who participate in the revelation of truth are very rigorously limited by the instructions of our superiors. We are not at liberty to anticipate the scientific discoveries of a thousand years. Revelators must act in accordance with the instructions which form a part of the revelation mandate. We see no way of overcoming this difficulty, either now or at any future time. We full well know that, while the historic facts and religious truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on the records of the ages to come, within a few short years many of our statements regarding the physical sciences will stand in need of revision in consequence of additional scientific developments and new discoveries. These new developments we even now foresee, but we are forbidden to include such humanly undiscovered facts in the revelatory records. Let it be made clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired. The cosmology of these revelations is not inspired. It is limited by our permission for the co-ordination and sorting of present-day knowledge. While divine or spiritual insight is a gift, human wisdom must evolve. [31]
As scientific knowledge advances, these statements may appear to be in error. But not every disagreement between science and The Urantia Book is automatically an example of this. For example: in the few months between the writing of this article and its pre-publication review, the local library replaced its fourth edition (copyright 1977) of the encyclopedia used as the primary source[32] with a fifth edition of the same publication (copyright 1982). In doing so, so much confusion arose that it was necessary to locate the fourth edition. Right under “Galaxy,” for example, the fifth edition had: 1) added the galactic corona to the galaxy, 2) rejected the 50,000 light-year radius of the galaxy published in the fourth edition and replaced it with a radius of 325,000 light-years, the difference between the agreement and disagreement with The Urantia Book; and 3) inserted an image of the central galactic bulge with a radius of 5,000 light-years and a thickness of 3,000 light-years, where the fourth edition had shown no image. Under “Star Cloud,” the fifth edition says exactly the same thing as the fourth, except that it has omitted one sentence: the statement that the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are not in our galaxy (again, the difference between agreement and disagreement with The Urantia Book).
It seems wiser to hesitate rather than condemn the scientific statements in The Urantia Book solely on the basis of apparent disagreements with current but evolving perspectives of science. Science is a tool. Like other tools, it can be misused, especially if its limitations are not recognized by those who use it. The fact that science frequently expresses its discoveries in numbers gives it an air of accuracy, even though its numbers are frequently wrong. Dr. Lewis Thomas, head of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, has pointed out this problem of scientists’ unwillingness to appreciate the true nature of science in the following words:
The challenge is not, as is sometimes thought, the path to building a solid and indestructible body of immutable truth, facts based on facts like twigs in an anthill. Science is not like that at all: it keeps changing, moving, revising itself, discovering that it is wrong and pushing itself forward again to redesign everything… Scientists do not ordinarily talk about their business in this way, because there is always in the air the feeling that this time we are right, this time we are on the verge of coming into possession of a finished science that knows almost everything about almost everything. [33]
Dr. Thomas’s observation is confirmed, and readers of The Urantia Book have long supported delaying such judgments on discrepancies between current astronomy and The Urantia Book, following the experience of Dr. Bart Bok, astronomer (and his colleagues), who wrote:
I remember the 1970s as a time when I and my vigilant colleagues were remarkably self-assured. The boundaries of the Galaxy seemed reasonably well established… We didn’t suspect that it would soon be necessary to revise the radius of the Milky Way upwards by a factor of three or more and thus increase its mass by a factor of 10… [34]
¶ To go deeper
Bart J. Bok, The Milky Way Galaxy, Scientific American (March, 1981)
Lewis Thomas, On the Uncertainty of Science, Harvard Magazine (September-October 1980)
Isaac Asimov, The Universe From Flat Earth to Black Holes–and Beyond, Walker and Compay, New York, 1980
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, 4th ed.
¶ References
¶ Footnotes
UB 0:0.6 “The seven evolving superuniverses in association with the central and divine universe, we commonly refer to as the grand universe; these are the now organized and inhabited creations. They are all a part of the master universe, which also embraces the uninhabited but mobilizing universes of outer space.” ↩︎
UB 0:0.5. “Your world, Urantia, is one of many similar inhabited planets which comprise the local universe of Nebadon. This universe, together with similar creations, makes up the superuniverse of Orvonton, from whose capital, Uversa, our commission hails. Orvonton is one of the seven evolutionary superuniverses of time and space which circle the never-beginning, never-ending creation of divine perfection—the central universe of Havona […]. At the heart of this eternal and central universe is the stationary Isle of Paradise, the geographic center of infinity and the dwelling place of the eternal God.” ↩︎
UB 15:1.2. “We have long since discovered that the seven superuniverses traverse a great ellipse, a gigantic and elongated circle.” ↩︎
UB 12:1.3. “Proceeding outward from Paradise through the horizontal extension of pervaded space, the master universe is existent in six concentric ellipses, the space levels encircling the central Isle:” ↩︎
UB 15:3.1. “The vast Milky Way starry system represents the central nucleus of Orvonton, being largely beyond the borders of your local universe.” ↩︎
UB 32:2.11. “The Satania system of inhabited worlds is far removed from Uversa and that great sun cluster which functions as the physical or astronomic center of the seventh superuniverse. From Jerusem, the headquarters of Satania, it is over two hundred thousand light-years to the physical center of the superuniverse of Orvonton, far, far away in the dense diameter of the Milky Way. Satania is on the periphery of the local universe, and Nebadon is now well out towards the edge of Orvonton. From the outermost system of inhabited worlds to the center of the superuniverse is a trifle less than two hundred and fifty thousand light-years.” ↩︎
UB 15:3.7. “The Sagittarius sector and all other sectors and divisions of Orvonton are in rotation around Uversa, and some of the confusion of Urantian star observers arises out of the illusions and relative distortions produced by the following multiple revolutionary movements:” […]. ↩︎
UB 15:3.5. “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.” […]. UB 15:3.11. “The travel of the local star cloud of Nebadon and its associated creations about its minor sector center in Sagittarius.” UB 15:3.12. “The rotation of the one hundred minor sectors, including Sagittarius, about their major sector.” UB 41:0.4. “Such is the constitution of the local star cloud of Nebadon, which today swings in an increasingly settled orbit about the Sagittarius center of that minor sector of Orvonton to which our local creation belongs.” ↩︎
Isaac Asimov, The Universe From Flat Earth to Black Holes–and Beyond, Walker and Compay, New York, 1980, p. 84 ↩︎
Isaac Asimov, idem, p. 90 ↩︎
Isaac Asimov, idem, p. 92 ↩︎
Isaac Asimov, idem, p. 203-207 ↩︎
UB 12:4.14. “Although your spectroscopic estimations of astronomic velocities are fairly reliable when applied to the starry realms belonging to your superuniverse and its associate superuniverses, such reckonings with reference to the realms of outer space are wholly unreliable” […] ↩︎
UB 11:6.2-5; 11:7; 12:4.12. ↩︎
Bart J. Bok, The Milky Way Galaxy, Scientific American (March, 1981), pp. 92-120. ↩︎
UB 15:4.8. “The Milky Way galaxy is composed of vast numbers of former spiral and other nebulae, and many still retain their original configuration. But as the result of internal catastrophes and external attraction, many have suffered such distortion and rearrangement as to cause these enormous aggregations to appear as gigantic luminous masses of blazing suns, like the Magellanic Cloud.” ↩︎
Bart J. Bok, idem, p. 94. ↩︎
Bart J. Bok, idem, p. 92-93. ↩︎
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, 4th ed. ↩︎
Lewis Thomas, On the Uncertainty of Science, Harvard Magazine (September-October 1980) ↩︎
Bart J. Bok, The Milky Way Galaxy, Scientific American (March, 1981), pp. 94. ↩︎