There was a little excitement the other day when a Russian radio telescope received a strong signal from a star system where the star was very similar to earth. I just can’t get too excited about these things for a couple of reasons. The first is radio signals travel at the speed of light. If an alien race was trying to answer one of the signals we sent out they couldn’t have received it yet unless they were very close. When we are looking at star systems hundreds and thousands of light years away we know this isn’t an answer to anything we sent. The second reason is we have found in the past when a satellite passes between the star we are listening to we can pick up its signal by mistake. There have been times when we have picked up signals from what we thought was something in orbit and yet we knew nothing was there. Some people think we may have picked up signals from alien UFOs. I think it is more likely they were from secret projects.

If an advanced alien race was sending out communications, why on earth would they use radio signals? This would be worthless to them unless they were very near each other. It is more likely they would be using what Einstein called spooky at a distance. This is a feature of quantum physics where you can effect one particle and another which is entangled with it, no matter how far away is instantly effected. This would be a way to have instant communication over any distance. It is a very complicated concept and calls for the particle to be in different places at the same time. Even though Einstein discovered this, he had his doubts about this, but new research has stated this is true. We will need instant communication if we ever get far enough out into space. Some say we are already out there with a secret space program and if we are and we haven’t perfected instant communications, we surely are at a huge disadvantage.

Black holes are being talked about again, because we just keep discovering new things about them even though we have never really seen one. The most we have seen is the disk containing matter which is being sucked into the black hole. Scientists are saying they have discovered a new feature of black holes and it is they are sending out information in their X-ray emissions. Scientists are telling us that due to the extreme gravity of a black hole they emit X-ray radiation and light with high energy. The X-ray radiation is said to come from the material circling the black hole before it is swallowed. The X-rays are said to contain Quantum information. This information is said to contain data about the warped space time which surrounds black holes. It is said space time is twisted when it is near a black hole. It will be interesting to see exactly what information we can extract from these emissions. Could it be we might discover something which will allow us to understand time travel better?

Scientists believe a new found galaxy is composed almost entirely of dark matter. The galaxy is about the size of our galaxy. Why do scientists think it is composed of dark matter? The reason given is there are very few stars in the galaxy and a galaxy of this type should not have existed very long since there was not enough gravity to hold it together, at least that is what is being said. Scientists have also noticed that Dragonfly 44, the galaxy, has stars which are moving at much higher speeds than expected, given the composition of the galaxy. This is what is making scientists believe there has to be unseen masses with strong gravity holding this galaxy together and also making the stars move so fast. As with other things in science we might find out in the future it was not dark matter holding the galaxy together. but something we had no knowledge of. If dark matter is confirmed it may not even be the entire story which explains the missing mass in the universe. Recently some scientists stated they thought black holes could also be responsible.

There have been studies made which seek to find out how dangerous it is to travel at or near light speed. You can imagine impacting something at 100 miles per hour in a car, how about hitting a grain of sand at 20% the speed of light which is still far too slow for space exploration?  It has been found that without shielding a speck of dust could destroy a ship. In the old days space was pictured as empty, but space is not empty, it has dust particles and even atoms scattered around through it. Even hitting an atom could be deadly since the energy from the collision could cause melting in the area of the hit. The damage would be caused by the heavier atoms, not so much by light ones from helium and hydrogen. The story would be different for a collision with an oxygen, magnesium or iron atom. Dust is usually composed of heavier atoms bound together so you can see the danger here. Running into gas is a problem, but it is not as dangerous as some other collisions. At 20% of light speed gas will penetrate material down to 0.1 millimeters while dust will penetrate about 1.5 millimeters into the surface and this is only at 20% light speed. You can see if a ship is hit too many times this will be the end of it, that is why some type of shielding is needed. Ideally it should be some sort of plasma shielding.

Some scientists think the universe might be different than we believe. They say there might be microscopic black holes flying through space and they could hit us at any time. While they could be smaller than a period in a sentence, they could weigh as much as our moon. Some of the scientists who think this might be true claim this could be the missing matter in the universe, not the traditional dark matter we have been looking for. No dark matter has ever been detected in space or underground and this has scientists scratching their collective heads, because about 90% of all matter is supposed to be dark matter so why can’t we detect it? The answer seems to be there could be a lot of other reasons for not detecting all the matter. Perhaps the universe is a lot smaller than first thought. Maybe other dimensions somehow interact with us and account for the missing matter. We could even find out the calculations are wrong and there is no missing matter. There could also be something else out there of which we have absolutely no knowledge.

Nothing is more mysterious than space. The more we find out the more we realize there is so much more we don’t know.