Science and Astronomy Did you ever hear the term Trojan asteroid? Most of us haven’t. One has been spotted. It happens to be a very rare object. It is an asteroid which travels ahead or behind of the earth in the same orbit. Only one other Trojan has ever been discovered. Here is an interesting tidbit, they travel in the Lagrange points L4 and L5. Does the term Lagrange point sound familiar? If it does, it probably is because we launched the Webb space telescope into a Lagrange point, L2. This is where the gravity from the sun and the earth exert an equal pull on an object, essentially keeping it in a parked spot. In this case that spot stays at the same distance as the object rotates with the earth. I have always had a problem with the idea 90 percent which some say now is 80 percent of the material in the universe is invisible. If we can’t see it, how do we prove it exists? By the way there are other estimates of how much material is invisible. The matter we cannot see has been named Dark Matter. It was something named to account for an unknown force witch is causing the universe to continue expanding. We didn’t understand why the expansion was not slowing down because we believed gravity would start to pull everything back together. Dark matter is a curious thing which may not be matter at all. There could be a force in the universe which is yet undiscovered. A report has come out which states a new universal force may have been discovered. Currently there are four forces we know about which are gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. An experiment was conducted but the results didn’t seem to make sense, because they didn’t go the way scientists expected. There is a particle called a muon. It is an elementary particle like an electron. It has a greater mass however. It is believed it cannot be broken down further into particles. The muons in the experiment did not act as predicted according to our current knowledge of physics. Scientist are thinking there may be new laws of physics we are about to discover. If this is so, we may have found a new force in nature. Science can be very interesting even to non-scientists, it all depends on what people’s interests are. I am interested in many different things and that is why I developed my website. There must be others who feel that way because I get people reading the articles. I also hate all those ads that pop up when you go on some sites, so I have no advertising. Anyway, if there is a new force found it might destroy the idea of dark matter and be the force causing the expansion of the universe. To me it seems more probable a force we don’t know is responsible for the expansion not a premise we made up. There is also another idea for why the universe is expanding and it is something called Dark Energy. It is believed by some scientists to be the opposite of gravity. It is called dark energy because we really do not know if it exists, we just think it does. The thing is we may have hit upon the idea of a force which could be the one talked about in the muon experiment. This could eventually explain the expansion of the universe if no other unknown forces are found. There is always one problem however and it is how will we ever know if we have found all the forces of nature? Recently a scientist put out a theory about gravitons. These are particles which were said to have no mass which control gravity. The scientist believes they do have mass and this would make up for the missing energy in the universe and dark energy would not exist. There is a question which has been asked for many years and it might sound absurd to ask, but some people believe it could be a possibility. The question is, is the universe alive? There is a claim which some physicists have made which states the universe is alive and human consciousness allows it to prosper. I find so much wrong with this idea. First of all, is there an implication there was no universe before humans? If this is so, talk about hubris. You can’t tell me there was no universe before us. If this means we somehow contribute to the well being of an already formed universe because our brain waves sort of nourish it, I really don’t think so, but who knows, maybe the brain waves of every living thing here and on other planets contribute to this. We learned something new about black holes. I suppose there is a lot yet to be learned about them. For the first time a magnetic field has been photographed swirling around a black hole. The photo was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope. Contrary to what you might think it is a system of more than one telescope. It consists of eight telescopes from around the world. The black hole they photographed was 55 million light years away in another galaxy. It is amazing being able to see this object from such a distance, let alone the magnetic field. Some scientists are explaining time might move forwards and backwards. One scientist in Great Britain has argued the Big Bang which many scientists believe created the universe was not the start, but the mid-point. I think what he means, which sounds incredible right now, is there was another universe before ours, where time was backwards from this one. I find it hard to believe because it seems a lot of things would not have been possible like birth. Could a person be born and keep getting younger until he landed back in his mother’s womb? I just can’t imagine a world where time flows backwards, can you? Scientists in Great Britain have proved Christiaan Huygens a 17th century scientist was correct. Light can be shaped and moved around if it is cooled to just above zero and certain elements are used such as ytterbium and strontium. They found if they control the elements with a laser, they were able to reshape beams of light. They controlled the atoms. I never like to make predictions, but I will in this case. If science keeps advancing the way it is, the human race will have such technology, it will be unrecognizable. If nations begin to cooperate in science and technology, it will be even further ahead.
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