Space: Conquering Beyond Ultra

 No one knows exactly how big space is. The difficulty arises because of what we can see in our detectors. We measure long distances in space in "light-years," representing the distance it takes for light to travel in a year, roughly 5.8 trillion miles, or 9.3 trillion kilometers. To be honest, our little minds do not comprehend space. 

Space exploration and discovery in outer space has always been my fascination since childhood. It has always been the dream of humankind to travel into space and explore what is beyond our Earth. Generally, the study of the space is done by the astronomers with their telescopes, but the real fun begins when it comes to physical exploration. These explorations are generally done by unmanned space shuttles or human-carrying spacecraft. Discarding the telescopes and going into a spaceship to make fun of gravity and checking out god’s other creation, a totally different species. 

Well, I still think that in a parallel universe our galaxy would be a project of an alien named ―ANXIETY-21, whose mother would be telling him every day to keep it on its actual place (?)

 So today I shall be talking about ―Beyond our solar system. There are total of 4,277 exo-planets confirmed, total of 3,174 planetary systems. Our galaxy ―milky way is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. Within it, there are at least 100 billion stars, and on average, each star has at least one planet orbiting it. This means there are potentially thousands of planetary systems like our solar system within the galaxy. Scientists studying galaxies observed that the stars in the outer parts are orbiting the galactic centers just as quickly as the stars further in, a violation of Newton's well established laws of gravitation. They deduced that something other than the stars and clouds of gas and dust known to comprise galaxies was providing extra gravity—lots of it. They calculated that there must be five times as much of this mysterious dark matter, detectable only by its gravitational pull, as there is of the matter we already knew about. The Local Group is only one of many, many clusters of galaxies, and they are all moving away from each other as more and more space comes into being between them. This means the universe, itself, is expanding. That discovery is what led to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. Scientists expected that the gravitational attraction of everything in the universe would put the brakes on the rate of expansion, and eventually the expansion would stop or even reverse. But in the 1990s, scientists discovered that the expansion is actually getting faster. The force responsible for this surprising acceleration was dubbed dark energy. No one is sure what it is, but one possibility is that it is energy contained within the very vacuum of space. Since matter and energy are equivalent scientists have been able to calculate that whatever dark energy is, it comprises about 68 percent of everything in the universe. Dark matter accounts for another 27 percent, leaving only five percent for protons, neutrons, electrons and photons – in other words, everything we see and understand. Scientists calculate that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each one brimming with stars. On a very large scale, they form a bubbly structure, in which vast sheets and filaments of galaxies surround gargantuan voids. All of the stars in the Milky Way orbit a supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center, which is estimated to be four million times as massive as our Sun. Fortunately; it is a safe distance from Earth, at around 28,000 light-years away. Our galaxy is one of countless billions in the universe, each having millions, or more frequently billions, of stars of its own. We call our galaxy the Milky Way because it appeared to ancient observers to be a milky band of light – like a cosmic roadway – stretching across the dark sky. The famous Hubble Space Telescope, which revealed the cosmos in great detail for the first time, will soon be replaced by the even more powerful James Webb Space Telescope. Meanwhile, the Kepler mission has scoured a section of our galaxy in search of other planets. Before 1983, the only confirmed planets were those in our own solar system, though scientists believed many planets were in orbit around distant stars. Then a team in 1983 spotted a disc around Beta Pictoris believed to be made up of the raw materials of planet formation—the first evidence of an exo-planet. The first exo-planet was discovered nine years later in 1992 and the numbers of known planets beyond our solar system have been growing rapidly ever since. 

From light that is visible in our telescopes, we have charted galaxies reaching almost as far back as the Big Bang, which is thought to have started our universe 13.7 billion years ago. This means we can "see" into space at a distance of almost 13.7 billion light-years. However, astronomers are not sure if our universe is the only universe that exists. This means that space could be a lot bigger than it appears to us. God has no intention to set limit for man to conquer space. Space exploration has brought about a new dawn of discovery.

 And I will be back next week with a new topic on space. Till then keep ―zoning out.

Content inspiration and statistics from NASA. 

- Devarshi Trivedi