Space News December 8, 2020 One of the most important instruments for observing the universe is the radio telescope at Arecibo, Porto Rico. It is a huge dish build into the countryside and has been functioning since 1963. The dish is very delicately tuned for radio wave reception and over the top of the dish is a huge pickup suspended by heavy cables. Unfortunately, one heavy cable had broken causing damage to the telescope but recently a second just snapped. Then the inevitable happened, the telescope collapsed. The Chinese also have a new massive radio telescope which was just constructed and is even bigger than the one at Arecibo. NASA has started a search for rogue planets. Those are the ones which float freely in space and are not orbiting a star. When you consider the size of the Milky Way you realize there has to be quite a few of them. There could even be rogue stars between galaxies because they were propelled out of their galaxies. We think they all will be cold dead worlds, but can we be one hundred percent sure? If we apply the problem of living on one of them to the type of life on Earth, the answer would be yes, but since we know nothing about what different types of alien life would be like we cannot say for sure. When NASA sent its Osiris-Rex spacecraft to the asteroid Bennu it got a surprise. It had been orbiting the asteroid for over 2 years and investigating the asteroid and what it found must have surprised the scientists. It found Bennu was hollow. We are finding out bodies being hollow is not so uncommon. We found out the moon was hollow and so was one of the moons of Mars, which is Phobos. Will we eventually find out there are more hollow bodies in our solar system? There are some people who believe our planet is hollow and there could be other life living there. There are also those who think when you find a hollow space inside a planet, moon or asteroid it might mean that body is actually a spaceship and was once used to transport beings here and some might still be living inside some of these places. At this point I have to ask the question could NASA have known Bennu was hollow and that is why we sent a spacecraft there? A fireball streaked through the sky in 2018 over our Midwest and also Canada. When it crashed to the ground meteor hunters raced out to track it down, and they succeeded. This meant the meteor had not had it chemical makeup changed by water getting on it. What they found astounded them. The meteor contained pristine organic compounds. If this meteor contained these compounds, does it mean others do also? If so, what percentage do and could this also mean they are responsible for starting life sometimes? I guess this has to be looked into further by checking meteors in space or returning samples, which I am still against. At the time I wrote this article China was planning to launch a lunar sample return mission. I guess this will be the object every country landing on the moon in the early future will shoot for. It is the prestige mission and countries who do this may feel they made it to the Big Time of space exploration. Meanwhile the Japanese have successfully returned samples from an asteroid. More about Phobos. The Earth’s moon is steadily moving away from our planet, but Phobos is moving toward Mars and in about 50 million years will crash into it. One astronomer says the both moons of Mars should not exist. Some scientists think the composition of the moon may be so unusual it could be unique in our solar system. Some calculations seem to show Phobos was far more massive at one time. I am talking about a lot more massive at twenty times the mass it now has. The hypothesis is it shattered while being dragged into the orbit of the planet and much of the material became ring material. They go on to say this happened many times over billions of years. One scientist thinks all the dust created by this entering Mar’s atmosphere over all that time caused Mars to become uninhabitable. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute has recently been able to increase their search techniques by a factor of over 200 times. They are touting this has a revolutionary breakthrough and are saying if a planet has a transmitter only twice or a little more powerful than the most powerful on earth, they will be able to detect it, if it is within range. Can space be warped? Astronomers have found a star which spins so fast they believe that is what it is doing. It seems White Dwarf stars which are the remains of dead star cores can spin so fast they make a complete revolution every minute or two. Scientists are saying this means their effect on spacetime is 100 million times more powerful than the effect of the earth spinning in space. When the Earth spins once every 24 hours the effect on space time is almost impossible to notice, not so with these spinning White Dwarf stars. We have all heard about black holes by now and how big and powerful they could become. There are also small ones however and while they are extremely powerful, they are no match for the bigger ones like the one in the center of our galaxy. Two physicist think there could be a black hole orbiting our sun. They think if there is, it will be about the size of a grapefruit. The physicists say it probably isn’t there, but it is worth finding out the answer. For years all we have been hearing is the universe is expanding and how someday every body in the universe will be isolated. We are now finding out if indeed the entire universe is expanding, it is now at the same rate everywhere and there might even be places where it isn’t, we just haven’t found them yet. Since the universe is so huge could there even be some areas which are contracting and we don’t know about them? I guess only time will tell. NASA scientists have noticed there is a problem with the atmosphere of Uranus. It is either being sucked out into space or blown out. They found this out by comparing photos of the planet from years ago to now. It seems Voyager 2 had flown through a cloud of Uranus’s atmosphere when it flew by.
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