Astronomy At The Edge

Now and then we hear about new astronomical discoveries by Hubble Space Telescope or by probes monitoring different planets. The existence of water in Titan is still a great mystery. Hubble keeps coming up with new stellar bodies which are impossible to view even with the largest grounded telescope. These images only provide less information on the size of the Universe but does not tell us whether it is expanding or not. Quasars provide some evidence on the expansion from the Doppler effect of light waves. In this case distant galaxies tend to move away from the observer causing the wavelength to increase. Hence, Quasars appear red from the Hubble Telescope.

There are other Astronomical Paradoxes which are difficult to solve. My favorite ones are the Black holes, Wormholes, relativity and Big bang. If wormholes provide a bridge between two parts of the Universe, it would be possible to conquer time. If nothing can go faster than the speed of light it would take several generations to reach alpha centauri. But our Universe is so gigantic that our it would become the year infinite if a fast space ship reaches Andromeda Galaxy. Our Solar System is like one atom in a cell where the planets are like electrons orbiting round the nucleus. There are endless possibilities in space.

Another mystery is about the age of our Universe. At first our Universe was thought to be old and going to dye soon. However, according to further research the age of our Universe is compared to a one day old infant. Thanks, to WMAP which took detailed studies about the remains of gas clouds after the Big Bang. There were a lot of contradictions on the age of the Universe. At past our Universe was thought to be 1-2 billion years old which contradicted the age of our Earth (4.6 billion years) and the age of the oldest stars (12 billion years.) According to WMAP, our Universe is actually 13.6 billion years old and it is continuing to expand. As a matter of fact our Universe can continue to exist till the next 150 billion years. Hence contradictions are resolved.

Most of us wish to time travel to undo the past or to foresee the future. We may think it is impossible but it is possible only if we could travel faster than light. According to relativity theory, anything that approaches the speed of light will appear to be short to the observer. If a person is in a space ship travelling close to the speed of light he would see that the processes outside the space ship would appear very slow. At the speed of light, everything outside the space ship would appear to be at a stop, just like pausing the Media Player. If the space ship travels grater than that speed, the processes outside the space ship would reverse and that person would go into the future. In order to make this possible, the equation E=mc^2 needs to be obeyed.

Space has a lot of mysteries behind. Even the Extra Terrestrial written by science fiction writers may be true. Some claims that life may exist in Europa and Titan. We may not know that one day Sojourner rover might step onto worms, making big history. Dendritic patterns on Mars show evidence about ancient river flows. From all these remarkable discoveries and more to come, we would soon open the unravel the hidden mystery behind space and time.