On Star Trek it is said space is the final frontier. This may not be the case, it could be time or something we haven’t discovered yet, but there is no denying the fact space is very interesting. One very interesting thing in space is the moon Phobos which is not only orbiting Mars, but it is circling to its doom as it gets closer to the planet with every orbit. Phobos has been of interest not only to scientists, but also to UFO buffs. The reason the UFO community is interested in Phobos is it is believed to be hollow and to contain a base inside. The reason for scientists to be interested in it is several fold. One reason is the one I have referred to as possibly being hollow. Another is the fact it is circling to its doom and will crash into Mars someday. There are strange scratches on its surface as if something just scratched along it and this also interests scientists. It certainly acts more like an artificial satellite than the moon of a planet. I say this, because it is not very far from Mars and is as a matter of fact closer to its home planet than any other moon in the solar system. It is orbiting Mars at only 3,700 miles above the planet. It is so close it is scraping the edge of the planet’s thin atmosphere. Was it ever a normal distance away or was it put there by some unknown civilization, perhaps even Martians?

Another moon which is fascinating scientists is Titan. Titan is the large moon of Saturn. There are a lot of reasons for this interest, not the least is it has a weather system not unlike the earth. It is believed there is a very good chance Titan could contain a large underground ocean. Once you talk oceans and extensive amounts of water, you are possibly talking about an environment where life might exist. It is the only place besides the planet earth where liquid exists on its surface. There is a mystery about one of these lakes and it has to do with what we will call an island in one of them. The lake is about 50,000 square miles and this particular island in the lake is about 100 square miles. While not huge for a land mass, it is quite sizeable. The island is easily seen on the photos from the Cassini spacecraft taken in 2013 and 2014. The island is being called “Magic Island” by scientists, because it doesn’t show up on photos from 2007 or from more recent photos taken on January 11, 2015. The liquid on Titan is liquid hydrocarbons and scientists are thinking the lakes and seas are active and not just sitting there. It is thought the island may be covered and uncovered at times by the liquid and there might be liquid waves active.

Our solar system seems pretty big, I think we would agree that anything which would take many years to get across with our current technology is big, but recently a new solar system discovery has made ours look downright cozy. Earth orbits its sun once about every 365 days.  The solar system which was discovered has a planet so far from its sun it orbits once about every 900,000 years.  The name of the planet is 2MASSJ3236a.  It lies at a distance of 621,000,000,000 miles from its parent star. The earth would orbit the sun 6,900 times before it could make one orbit. The parent star is a red dwarf. I have to say I wonder about this. I have to ask, how could the gravitational pull of the red dwarf star be strong enough to keep this planet in an orbit when it is so far away? I don’t see this question being asked yet, but I have to wonder if there is something else going on we don’t know about yet.

As we build bigger and better telescopes we increase our ability to see further into space and since light travels at 286,000 miles a second we are looking at things from the past, because of the time it takes the light to reach us. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. If the sun blew up it would take us about 8 minutes to find out, because that is how long the light would take to travel the 92 million mile distance. This means when we look at the sun we are seeing it as it looked 8 minutes ago. Now think of how far distant galaxies are and how long their light takes to reach us. We could very easily be looking at the light of galaxies which do not exist anymore. Scientists are saying they have discovered the most distant galaxy ever. It is named GN-z11. It is said to be 13.4 billion light years away, so this means we are seeing it as it looked 13.4 billion years ago. Scientists have estimated the big bang which formed our universe took place 13.8 billion years ago. This means if we ever find a galaxy at a distance more than the 13.8 billion light years in distance, the entire age of the universe would have to be scrapped. I look forward to more powerful telescopes, because I would like to know what lies beyond that 13.8 billion light year distance if anything.

The moons in our solar system are fascinating places, because some of them present a place which is more favorable for finding life than the planets. One such moon is Charon, a tiny moon of the dwarf planet Pluto. NASA’s New Horizons mission flew past Charon and measured its topography. It found some tectonic faults and some believe its skin is too small for its size. Charon has a radius of only 606 kilometers, yet it has valleys which are 4 miles deep. The scientists say it can’t have a crust like earth, because it doesn’t have a heated core, so what is causing this? It is believed Charon had water below its surface and when it froze it lifted the surface which cracked. This small moon has one of the longest systems of chasms in the solar system. It runs about 1,100 miles and reaches 4.5 miles deep. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long and about a mile deep.

If we were to examine each of the moons in our solar system we would realize how unique some of them are. There is no doubt as we travel out into space we will use some of these heavenly bodies to put bases on. Perhaps when we do, we will find out someone has already done this at some time in the past.