The Universe 200311

The Sentinel All the news that's fit to print and some that's not.
Vast Beyond Compare If you have access to Netflix I urge you to watch the series "The Universe." I am not usually into a healthy dose of science much less with astronomy, but I found this series breathtaking. They cover all of the planets and the moon, what they are like, how they got started and what the future may bring. The Andromeda galaxy is headed toward crashing into our Milky Way galaxy and disintegrating both of them, ending all life. Don't worry too much over this, it will happen after a few billion years.	Some Things That Surprised Me There is no air in space. That much is known by most people, but the thing that surprised me is that with no air there is no sound. An example given was if you were in space and you were playing a piano, no one would hear it, not even you. The reason is that hearing is only possible by pushing air waves in your direction and your ear detecting it. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second; I knew that before, but some galaxies are a billion light years away. To calculate how far that is one has to take 186,000 times the number of seconds in a year 31,576,000 that answer times 1,000,000,000 gives the answer to just one galaxy and there are a billion galaxies. Fun fact, people who are abducted by extra-terrestrials all report that the ET's do not speak, but they do communicate telepathically. That starts to make sense now. There is no sound in space, so aliens have to communicate without words.	Mars the Moon, Dark Energy, Black Holes On earth we can see 51 miles from an airplane at 2000 feet in the air. It's a factor of the horizon and the height above it. Mars is 151.86 million miles away, yet we can see it with the naked eye in a clear night sky. Astronomers suggest that the beginning of our moon was formed in less than one day as a result of the big bang. The big bang was a very interesting event. It started with a tremendous compression of matter and energy exploding with intense heat beyond imagination and starting our universe 13.5 billion years ago and it is still expanding outward. The universe series also brushes by what are called black holes, (a region in space with gravitational pull so strong not even light can pass through it). There is also a brief talk about dark energy, a force no one can see, yet there is as much or more than what we call regular energy that moves everything around.