There seems to be some confusion about where the sun and Earth are located in the universe. I am going to attempt to clear up some confusion here by proving something mind blowing.

I realize of course many people are going to navigate away from this page when they see the title (and I can’t blame them) but if you’re willing to spend some time reading this I think you’ll agree with me at the end.

Before I show my proof, let’s talk about the history of our understanding of the universe. Those of you who have lived in cities your entire life might be surprised to learn that once (before bright city lights existed) the sky looked like this:

What you’re seeing in this video is a sped of recording of the night sky which was most likely recorded some place very far away from cities and artificial lights.

Once upon a time the night sky looked like this for everyone all the time. So hopefully it’s easy to understand why some people would be so fascinated by the night sky. Many people tried to keep careful track of the strange lights and objects in the sky.

Around the 16th century the church tried to convince everyone that the Earth was the center of the universe and that all these things that would move through the sky throughout the day and night were actually moving in giant circles around the Earth.

Their reasoning was that God created the entire universe just for mankind, and that therefore mankind was the most important thing in the universe. They thought that since we live on the Earth, and that one of the most interesting parts of the universe is its center, that this therefore meant that the Earth was the center of the universe.

However it was around this time that Galileo Galilei suggested that the sun was the center of the universe and that the Earth orbited the sun. This was his attempt to explain the strange movement of things in the sky that he had noticed.

It’s important to notice the wording here though “the sun is the center of the universe” This was proposed long before anyone fully grasped just how vast the universe truly is. This has confused a lot of people because the sun probably isn’t the center of the entire universe. For one thing it is in orbit around the galaxy and therefore is constantly moving.

Today we realize that the sun is the center of the solar system, and that (of course) the Earth orbits the sun in the solar system.

However consider this for a moment: the Earth is roughly 8 light minutes away from the sun. This is a very small distance in comparison to the vast distances of the entire known universe, so for the moment let’s pretend that the Earth was the center of the solar system (yes I realize this is scientific heresy, but it simplifies the math here).

The “known universe” is defined to be all of the universe that we can see from here on Earth. We can only see a certain distance into space because light from beyond the KNOWN universe has yet to reach us. Interestingly, regardless of which direction we look in the night sky, we will only be able to see the same distance outwards.

So imagine for a second that we started point our telescope in as many different directions as possible and were to somehow mark all of the points that we have seen through these telescopes. If we were to do this then each of those makers would be the same distance from the Earth. These markers would form some kind of shape, where the markers could only be placed on the surface of this shape.

It’s important to know that all points on the surface of a sphere are equally distant to the center of the sphere, and that a sphere is the only 3 dimensional shape that this is true for. Also the center of the sphere is the only point in it that is equally distant to all points on the spheres surface.

Since all of these markers are equally distant to the Earth, and are at the boundary of the KNOWN universe, this must mean that the known universe is a sphere and that the Earth is roughly at the center of it (“roughly” because the Earth isn’t actually at the center of the solar system).

Of course we are probably not the center of the actual universe; however we are at the center of the parts of the universe that we can actually see.