planets

[Guest guest]

Hare Krsna.

Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.

 

We all know that many of Srila Prabhupada's disciples left the movement

immediately following the release of the Fifth Canto, due to mass

unacceptance of the Vedic descriptions of the universe and planetary

arrangements there.

 

Do any of the learned scholars present have any data reconciling those

statements with the findings of recent space explorations?

 

With the speed of light being accepted by the International Astornomical

Union System of Astronomical Constants (1976) as 186 282 statute miles per

second, for light to travel from the Sun to one side of the universe,as

stated in SB 5.20.43 to be 25 koti yojanas (or 2 billion miles, or 2 000 000

000 miles by US standards (the UK billion is 1 followed by 12 zeros)), would

take approximately 3 hours. Obviously in terms of light years not a great

distance.

 

To quote Comptons Encyclopaedia:

"On clear nights the Milky Way, a wispy band of faint white light, stretches

roughly north and south across the sky. Actually, the band is a cluster of

myriads of stars called a galaxy. Our sun is only one of them. The entire

galaxy is lens shaped, with its center toward the constellation Sagittarius

(the Archer), almost 33,000 light-years away. The galaxy is about 15,000

light-years thick at the center and about 100,000 light-years across. It

contains more than 100 billion stars. As far as powerful telescopes can see,

there are some tens of billions of other galaxies, spaced on the average

about one million light-years apart. One of the nearest is the great galaxy

in Andromeda. It is shaped like a giant pinwheel; and it rotates about its

axis. Our galaxy is similar, and the sun makes one trip round approximately

every 200 million years. "

 

Your servant,

Vraja Kumara das