Space/Planets Update 04/26/10
Our Universe Dark Matter has been in the news an awful lot lately. I have consistently mentioned it and at times said that we could be wrong about its existence, but science seems insistent that it has to exist along with dark energy and that is what accounts for the reason that the universe is still expanding and expanding faster and faster. They premise this on the fact that they have measured the visible universe and there is not enough material, or matter to account for this expansion. I have often said that science has been wrong many times throughout history. That is just the nature of science. We seem to have to make mistakes before we can learn. Maybe I shouldn't put it that way because sometimes we are right, but it is hard to know when that happens, because years later we might find out that we weren't right at all. There is a very interesting report from Discovery News. I say it is interesting because science has stated that we only see 5 percent of all the matter in the universe and that is why 95 percent has to be dark matter and dark energy, but back to what I want to tell you. The report states that we, "may have underestimated the tally of galaxies in some parts of the universe by as much as 90 percent." Yikes this is the missing figure. If we missed by 90 percent maybe we missed by 95 percent? Maybe we missed by even more and there is more matter that we even thought that we needed for the expansion. This is being called an epic miscalculation. This certainly makes one wonder doesn't it? If there is enough matter that isn't dark matter to keep the universe expanding, than does dark matter even exist and if it does, is there far less of it that we first thought? One of the reasons that was given for missing so many stars was that dust is blocking the light from weak galaxies. It has nothing to do with them being dark galaxies, that is galaxies made from dark matter. Astronomers have found something that surprised them. They are objects that are too hot to be planets and yet they are too small to be stars. So far two objects have been found and they are both circling stars. These objects are so hot that they are said to be thousands of degrees hotter than the surface of the stars that they circle. This is highly unusual and it means that the heat from the star may not be responsible for their heat. It is believed that they are bigger than any planets in our solar system. When scientists were asked how hot the objects were, they were told that they were about 26,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface of our sun is about 9,900 degrees Fahrenheit. It is believed to be about 27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit at its core. It would be very interesting to find out how hot these objects are at their cores. One theory states that these might be planets after, but newly born.
Voyager 1 Voyager 1 reached over 10 billion miles from the sun in January of this year. As a matter of fact it was almost at 10.5 billion miles on the last day of January 2010. The probe is still sending signals, but now they take over 31 hours to reach us. It was launched on September 5th, 1977 and is now traveling at a speed of 10.5 miles per second. It is heading to the boundary of the solar system with interstellar space and is traveling fast enough to achieve solar system escape velocity. It is headed toward the nearest star and is scheduled to arrive in about 75,000 years. The probe is expected to generate enough energy to keep sending a signal until 2025, at which time it should go silent.
The Big Bang Getting back to the big bang. That is where a supposed super atom exploded and formed everything we see and sent all this stuff hurtling away from a central point. This is true isn't it? Maybe not. There are a few scientists that think that space itself somehow exploded and caused the universe and everything in it to form and this explosion has caused everything to expand out into space. Along with space exploding, the theory states that time exploded, because there is a relationship between space and time. This means that there was no super atom and there was no material that exploded. This is a very hard concept to understand, but space is a very strange place and we shouldn't be too surprised when things happen that we can't explain right away. This also implies something else. It implies that there was no place. Right now we are in a place in space. We are on the planet earth and are surrounded by other planets and stars. Before this explosion it is said that there was no place to be in. This is the kind of stuff that makes my head hurt. I don't know how many people have heard about this, but I don't think very many. A new moon of Saturn has been discovered. It is not in the traditional orbit around the planet as we would think that it would be, rather it is actually inside one of Saturn's rings. It is in an outer ring and was seen by the Cassini spacecraft. The moon is very tiny and I was surprised to see that they were even calling it a moon since it is only 1/3 miles wide. For many years the planet Mercury was thought of by the scientific community as just a rock. That has all changed thanks to the Messenger space probe. It turns out that Mercury is a lot more active than first thought. Its many volcanoes have spewed out lava that has caused some very smooth areas on the planet. These smooth areas were always a mystery since it was not thought that there was much, if any volcanic activity on the planet. Craters have been found that are the size of the Baltimore – Washington D.C. Area that are filled in with with lava that is over one mile deep. It turns out that Mercury is not the planet we thought that it was. Scientists now believe that the chemical mixes on stars are relative to their temperatures. Cool stars are said to have a different mix of life-forming chemicals from hot stars. This was discovered by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The message that was found is that if a star is cooler than our sun, the chemical mix may be different and this certainly could effect the creation of life. |
