Facts About Our Universe The universe is a lot bigger than many people say it is. In order to realize the known size, we have been told many times since the big bang, the explosion which most scientists claim started the universe, was estimated to have taken place 13.5 billion years ago and since nothing is said to be able to travel faster than light, then the edge of the universe is 13.5 billion light years away. They couldn’t be more wrong. They are forgetting the fact the universe is also expanding which means that universal edge is a lot further away. How far is it? I have seen different estimates but the prevailing one is somewhere between 40 to 45 billion light years away. I saw one formula for the expansion which states the rate is about 74.3 Kilometers per second per megaparsec of 3 million light years or about 46.17 miles per second. I have to be honest when I get into figures like this it turns my mind to mush. I can’t help but think how do we know space is expanding, I have always thought of space as a void? Today we know it isn’t but it still looks pretty empty. I saw an explanation of this, but it confused me, but I will give it to you anyway. The explanation states “In the spacetimes that are used in cosmology to describe our universe, when you do the slicing in such a way that each 3-dimensional slice is homogeneous and isotropic, then the scale factor of the slices increases with time. ” Does this help any of us civilians to understand space expansion any better? In all honesty it doesn’t help me. Could all this mean space expands not in the general area, because the planets have their routes which doesn’t seem to change much, but over the huge distance such as between those megaparsec objects is it noticeable? What will happen to the universe because of the expansion of space or is it possible we will find out again science was wrong and space is not expanding but only seems that way? It is being said the galaxies are moving further away from each other except for, you guessed it, the exceptions. In those cases, galaxies move closer to each other and collide. We used to think the Andromeda Galaxy was about two times the size of the Milky Way. Today we believe it is about the same size and more importantly is heading our way. It turns out even though most galaxies are getting further away from each other, the ones that are close enough to each other are governed by their gravitational attraction to each other even though the entire group are moving as a whole further from the other galaxies. I hope this doesn’t sound like gobbledygook. Don’t worry the date for our galaxy to crash with Andromeda is 4 billion years away. More is getting revealed about black holes all the time. First, we didn’t know they existed. Then we found out even though we couldn’t actually see them. What we could see was what known as the event horizon. That is where all the material swirls around a black hole as it is being pulled inside. The next thing we discovered is almost all galaxies have a black hole in the center and there may be far more than one black hole per galaxy. We found out their gravitational pull is extreme destroying the planets and stars that get too close, and any other bodies. Now we have just found the remains of some galaxies that have way more black holes than you could imagine. This leads to the thought, could this be one of the ways a galaxy finally meets its end, by producing so many black holes it gets eaten alive? I think we are all familiar with the planet Saturn. It is the one with the beautiful rings. It certainly can’t be mistaken for one of the other planets in a telescopic view. The heavy rings are what makes it unique. Has hard as it may be to believe there is a galaxy which seems to have the same type of set up, it was named Hoag’s Object. It is probably one of the most unique galaxies in space. There is a bright yellow cluster of stars in the center then almost empty space, and then a circular ring cloud of stars around it. Science really doesn’t know how it was formed. If I was to guess I would say there was a big explosion in the center which pushed almost all the material outward in a circular pattern, but who knows what really happened. There is another galaxy which is also circular, but we only see it from an edge on view. It has been named the Sombrero Galaxy because there is a bulge in the center. When we talk about strange things in space, one of the strangest is the neutrino. It is a particle which comes from both healthy stars and dying ones and they have almost no mass. The mass is so slight it was thought it didn’t exist until recently. The particle can pass through everything even our planet and come out the other side and even scarier is the fact millions of these pass through us all the time. One has to wonder what part they play in our health. Would we be better off if they didn’t pass through us? Could they be the cause of aging to some extent? I have never heard anything about them being checked for this, perhaps because we can’t really catch them. We know they exist because scientists have set up large tanks full of cleaning fluid deep underground and when the neutrinos pass through it, they make a trail. All this proves to me there could be things in space which are affecting us we know nothing about yet. Space is mysterious and space is dangerous. It takes a lot of guts to become an astronaut or cosmonaut and I applaud the bravery of these people. We may think of it as getting to be routine, but nothing could be further from the truth.
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