The Contents of Space
This is probably nothing more mysterious than a black hole. We have been noticing a lot more data about them lately. As I mentioned previously we have been told for years that nothing could escape from a black hole and yet just recently scientists observed light escaping from one. I don’t believe they really know how this could happen, but I do believe they were making an educated guess when they said that something which exploded near the event horizon of the black hole produced the light. The event horizon is where all the material is swirling around the black hole as it is being sucked in. Another thing we have found out is that our galaxy has more than one black hole. We knew there was a huge one at the center of the galaxy, but now we have found a smaller one. Another discovery concerning black holes was made a little while ago and it states that a very bright galaxy named W2246-0526, which is located about 12 ½ billion light-years from Earth, has a black hole in it which is so huge it is tearing the galaxy apart. It is amazing how we can be so sure about something which is so far away. When we see the destructive power of a black hole it makes you wonder why anyone would want to create one on earth no matter how small it was, but scientists at the Large Hadron Collider want to do that and they are telling us not to worry, because the black holes will be microscopic and will disappear right away. I am sure we all hope they are right and that these black holes don’t start to expand if indeed they are created.
Astronomers are telling us that a newly developed method for determining the age of stars needs a recalibration for stars that are older than our sun. I guess this is a puzzling statement to the layman, I know I wondered why this might be true, but then I read the reason. The scientists are saying that older stars have magnetic fields that slow down the Spin rate of the star. A new procedure called Gyrochronology calculates the age of a Sun-like star using the rotation and mass to approximated age. Scientists had believed that these older stars had spin rates that were much lower, but now they are finding out is not true. It has been discovered that the magnetic field of an old star doesn’t slow down its speed as much as they thought, which makes some of the calculations on age incorrect. Astronomers want the ability to determine how old a star is, because they feel it will improve their understanding of the life cycles of astronomical systems. There have always been a few rogue scientists who claim we have gotten the age of the sun and planets wrong and they are really much older than most scientists believe.
There is one thing about space that cannot be denied and that is it is a very dangerous place. There are huge explosions and bursts of all sorts of rays taking place and they reach out into phenomenal distances. Stars in other solar systems in our galaxy which are light-years away could still destroy the earth if they unleashed a large Gamma Ray explosion. Our atmosphere could be destroyed killing all life on earth. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught in the blast of x-rays either. When we finally get the ability to travel through the universe there are going to be places we have to avoid. An example of this would be the blast a star gave off when it exploded and is traveling through space. The faster our spacecraft go the faster the calculations will need to direct our ship around dangerous areas and from incoming dangers. Even traveling at the speed of light, which is nowhere fast enough for us to really get around, calculations would have to be so fast they exceed our speed by many times otherwise we could find ourselves either hitting solid objects or running into rays traveling across the universe.
It is amazing how much different stars vary in size. Some stars are so large that if you put ours next to them, our sun looks like a grain of sand next to a basketball. On the other hand some stars are so small compared to our sun they look like a grain of sand and while this is true it is possible they can have a mass far greater than our sun. The universe is truly an amazing place.
For a few years scientists have been predicting that we live in a multiverse, that is a place where there are more universes than just our own. While I have to admit the universe is a very strange place, I do have to wonder how a person can be sure what they’re looking at is another universe? This seems to be the problem which has plagued us for many years. Scientists think they might have found another universe sitting right next to ours. If this is true it could be the greatest discovery of the century. The reason they are all excited is the scientists have found bright patches throughout space and they can’t account for them. The theory states the light they are looking at might have spilled through from another universe very close to ours. They also think it could be left over from another universe that began in the vicinity of our own. Some scientists believe we are going to be able to see into another universe someday. Will it be made of matter or antimatter? I guess more importantly the question is will there be life living in it? Can you imagine life created from antimatter, we would never be able to go near it without destroying each other?
The Kepler telescope has finished the mission where it found 100 new planets. I personally don’t think we should be surprised anymore when we find a new planet since it has become obvious they are everywhere in our galaxy. We probably should’ve realized this right away even before we began exploring, because there was no reason to think we were anything special. Our solar system is turning out to be pretty typical and while it may have slightly more planets than some of the others, we will probably find solar systems which have far more planets. If the theory that states the seeds of life are carried by asteroids and comets turns out to be true, it may just be that our universe is full of life, far more life than we suspect. There is a very good chance we will find out that even our solar system has more planets than we suspect and that the Oort Cloud, which resides past Uranus and Pluto, may even have planets in it which are bigger than Jupiter.
There is just so much we don’t know about the universe we live in and as time goes by one can only hope we will get a lot more answers.
