Space Mysteries

I know I am always saying just when we think we know what is going on in space we find out there are things going on we never suspected. Let me start this article by saying we believe life must be plentiful in the universe, because of the number of planets we have found. We have found many and some exoplanets are not that different from the earth, or are they? A recent announcement was made which states something was found encircling the earth and it was akin to a force field. Why is it we have never noticed this before? Is it the fact our instruments were not powerful enough until now? One has to remember this force field which is said to exist about 72,000 miles above the earth has been flown through in the past by astronauts going to the moon and by a myriad of space probes so it seems unlikely we didn’t realize something was there. It is said to protect us from electrons bombarding us from space and these electrons could be quite lethal. Is the shield’s existence just a coincidence or was it put there? If it is needed to sustain life and most of the other planets don’t have it does this mean there is less life in the universe than we now believe and we are truly rare beings?

Finding the shield around the earth just reinforces the fact we don’t know about a lot of things happening in space, even things which are near our own world. Years ago there was talk about another earth which was just about in the same orbit we were, but was always on the other side of the sun as we rotated around it. This belief goes back to at least 470 B.C. and the ancient Greeks. Today this planetary idea is called the Counter-Earth. Today we no longer believe in this, except for a fringe element, because we supposedly have instruments which would detect the disturbance to the sun which would be caused by another earth even if it were out of sight. Another reason we no longer believe there is another body behind the sun is we have seen that there is nothing there. In 2006 we sent two probes orbiting the sun and they saw behind it. This is proof just because we suspect something is so, it doesn’t make it true and this is why I have problems with many of the theories put forth about objects in space and space itself.

Here we go again. There was a new study conducted by theoretical physicists at Case Western Reserve University and it suggests Dark Matter may be massive. Dark Matter is the theoretical matter which is needed to balance out theories about the universe since the matter we can see only accounts for about 10% of the universe, according to physicists. I am still waiting for undeniable proof that dark matter exists and have been waiting for it for a long time. There are a few scientists who believe there is no such thing as Dark Matter and the universe is being held together by something else and it could be electricity, or some other force which is unknown to us at the present time. We are told there are four forces which govern the universe and they are:
1. Electromagnetism
2. Gravity
3. Weak Nuclear Force
4. Strong Nuclear Force
Could we ever discover more? Why not, we seem to be discovering many things we never suspected existed before. We have to keep an open mind and be ready for new discoveries. While we are doing this we can’t allow ourselves to attribute every problem to undiscovered forces. It is like walking a tightrope. The first thing which has to be done is discount every possible conclusion using the forces we know about, before we even think there might be something else involved.

Astronomers have announced they have found evidence of stars which populated the universe when the first stars were formed and the astronomers say they were monsters. They are said to have had a mass which was hundreds of time that of our sun and were the first to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements which left a chemical signature behind. The scientists say they found this signature in ancient second generation stars. One of the elements which is said to have fused into these stars was lithium, the same element which is now appearing in our batteries. Astronomers believe the very first star formed had a very short life span, only about a few million years which is nothing compared to the age of average stars today. These discoveries were made using a technique known as Stellar Archaeology.

Why are we seeing so many meteors in our skies lately? Just a little while ago a meteor streaked across the Russian sky causing all sorts of damage. There have been many reports of meteors being seen streaking across our skies and a meteor was reported streaking across the sky from Corpus Christi to Laredo to Lubbock. That is a distance of more than 500 miles. The meteor was said to cause the ground to shake as it passed over Texas. Could it be we are just reporting and recording more meteors than we did in the past and it just seems we are seeing more meteors and are we really seeing meteors or are these things space debris and secret satellites falling out of orbit?

It is now being said that most astronomical observations come in the form of digital data which almost anyone with a computer can access. Gone are the days when expensive equipment was required for observing. I can personally attest to this having owned a large reflecting telescope which I used to do amateur astronomy work with. Today I can see far more just by plugging my computer into some of the sites available on the internet and even go directly to a telescope site, a telescope which is much larger than almost any amateur can afford. Most astronomers today do their observing on a monitor not at the butt end of an eyepiece attached to a telescope. The truth is it is a lot more comfortable than being outside in the freezing cold of winter. New algorithms on computers have been responsible for discoveries which might never have been made using simple observations.

Scientists are saying binary earth sized planets which orbit around each other and orbit around a star are possible. They have come to this conclusion, because there are many examples of binary bodies in the universe. It is said most stars are binary and there are many moons which orbit other moons. Some of the orbiting moons have been found to be as large as half the size of what they orbit. This has made scientists think why couldn’t planets of equal size orbit each other.