Our Universe I read something the other day which was very strange. Some scientists think our universe can’t exist, because of some of the things that make it up. The universe is one of the favorite targets for some scientists. They want to know how it was created, when it was created and why it exists. When we look at the universe it seems to be never ending and yet Einstein said this wasn’t true and if we sent a beam of light into the universe, there would be a time when it came back to the starting point. If he was correct it would seem to indicate the universe might be a bubble shape. We can no more see this than a germ can see the house it is in. The universe is a very strange place and no matter how hard we try, so far, we can only see about 5% of the matter in it, because the rest is said to be composed of what is known as dark matter. Most people don’t know what dark matter is. Dark matter is not made of the same stuff as ordinary matter, according to science. It is not made of protons and neutrons. This is all hypothetical of course and eventually could turn out to be wrong. This all stems from simulations which show about 95% of the matter in the universe seems to be missing, so scientists assumed it must exist and we just can’t see it. Besides dark matter, scientists think dark energy exists. It is thought dark matter doesn’t have a source we can pinpoint. It is believed empty space has a residual energy. Supposedly since space is so huge all this dark energy can cause space to expand. This again is also hypothetical. There has been a lot of talk about energy being found in space and some inventors and scientists claim they can tap into this energy. If we are talking in terms of quantum energy, energy on the smallest scale, it is believed quantum energy never goes to zero, but is always fluctuating. If we apply this theory to space we have to believe energy is always there. We still need a lot more work in this area to know what is really going on or to verify the theories about this. Recently two neutron stars were said to have collided. Neutron stars are incredible objects. As hard as it is to believe they can spin up to 500 times in a second. They are also so dense it is almost unbelievable. The material is squeezed together under so much pressure one teaspoon of their material can weigh about 10 million tons. They are said to be created when giant stars explode in supernovas and their cores collapse. The protons and electrons melt into each other and form neutrons. It seems our sun will never become a neutron star, because it doesn’t have enough mass to start with. Normally neutron stars are said to be created by exploding stars which have at least 4 to 8 time the mass of our sun. They are very small for a star, being about 12 miles in diameter, but they have considerable gravity. The gravity is about 2 billion times stronger than the gravity on the earth. The star which is our sun happens to be at the correct distance from earth to give us a comfortable planet, one which is perfect for human and animal life. The question is does life adapt to the distance of its star or is the distance of the star critical for life to develop? Our sun is about 93 million miles away. It puts out a tremendous amount of energy. How much energy does it put out? It is said to release the same amount of energy every second as 100 billion tons of TNT. The diameter of the sun is about 109 times that of the earth. If we wanted to fit earth size planets in to the sun, we could fit about one million of them into it. There is a huge difference between the temperature on the surface of the sun and its interior temperature. The temperature on the surface is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature in the interior is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Our sun is only one of more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy. It is believed the sun is 4.6 billion years old. An interesting fact about the sun is when we see it we are looking at the sun’s past, because of the speed of light. It takes 8.5 minutes for the sun’s light to reach us so even if the sun blew up, it would take us this amount of time to know. Black holes are areas in space where gravity is so dense not even light is said to be able to escape from them, except scientists think they saw one instance where it may have. There was a theory which stated when black holes collided gravitational waves would be created. Einstein stated gravitational waves existed, but it wasn’t until 2015 when they were actually detected. One of the stranger things about black holes is the stretch factor. If an object is being pulled into a black hole the gravity pulling it is more at the beginning of the object than at the end of it, if a human was being pulled they would be stretched out and destroyed. With our current technology it doesn’t seem there would be anyway to survive a trip through a black hole. The sun was created first from a cloud of gas and material and then next the planets, at least that is what we are told. There certainly could be things about the creation of the solar system we are yet to find out. An example of this could be one or more of the planets were captured by the sun and fell into an orbit around it. The same principle is true for moons, we have hundreds of them and some could have been captured by the planets they rotate around. Some of the moons could have been asteroids or meteors traveling through the solar system. We are trying to find out if life exists on any of the other planets or on one or more of the many moons and since some are believed to have water scientists are hopeful there will be some sort of life. Our universe is an amazing thing which is so complicated we may always have questions about it. The more we explore it the more questions we might have. |
