What is really out there?

This is another question that people have been asking for a long time. Essentially, it could be rephrased as: what is out there in the universe?

As you know, the universe is an unbelievably huge cosmos. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies that can be seen and they're grouped into clusters of galaxies, which are in turn grouped into superclusters with millions of clusters of galaxies. What are all of these galaxies doing out there? Why is the universe so large? What is its purpose? As you might see, this is much the same type of question as the last: What is the meaning of life?

The fact that the universe is so large and vast is because of the amount of energy that was released in the Big Bang event 13.7 billion years ago that expanded to form the universe. Ultimately, all of the energy that was present then is still present. Some of it was converted into matter, which is why we exist.

If you look at the universe the way astronomers do you see a lot of violent action; stars are constantly blasting into life; massive stars are dying by exploding as a supernova; spinning pulsars are shooting powerful beams of energy out, sweeping across space like death beacons; Magnetars are emitting massive amounts of energy and filling space with enormously powerful magnetic forces; black holes are blasting out two powerful beans of energy as quasars; galaxies are crashing into one another; white dwarfs are eating nearby stars until they explode as a type 1a supernova; some of these supernovae are shooting powerful killer gamma ray bursts out into space; neutron stars are orbiting so close that they collide in a brilliant explosion; planets and comets are crashing into stars; stars are emitting coronal mass ejections, some of which are so powerful they emit more light than a thousand suns. Why is all this violence happening?

The reason is called physics. Astrophysicists explain this by the fact that matter and energy are interchangeable according to Einstein's famous equation, and we're not talking about a small amount of energy. A massive star has enormous mass when compared to our sun. An O-type blue star has a mass that is anywhere from 16 times to perhaps 100 times the mass of our sun. They burn bright, as much as 100,000 times as bright as our sun and they can have surface temperatures of 52,000 K. These giants make our sun look like a planet or a small dim star. They range in sizes to more than several million times the size of our sun, which is nearly a million miles in diameter. These stars put out more energy than millions of our sun, but they die quick, sometimes in only a few hundred thousand years, and when they die, they can explode in a supernova that outshines the entire galaxy they're in. It's easy to see how much energy is out there in just one star, and there are more of these stars than we could count. The fact is that they represent a clear and present danger to us here on Earth. If a nearby star explodes and sends a gamma ray burst right at us, it's curtains for all life on this planet. A gamma ray burst has more energy than the sun will emit in its 10 billion year life. Some scientists believe that our planet has been hit by one of these deadly emissions and it caused a mass extinction of life. Fortunately for us it didn't kill everything.

One of the largest stars near our solar system is VY Canis Majoris in the constellation Canis Major. This behemoth has a diameter of 13.2 AU (Astronomical Units), which is 1.9 trillion miles. This would mean that if our Sun were that large, it would extend all the way to Jupiter. It's a big massive red giant star that was probably a large O-class at one time.

It's a cruel and violent universe out there, but there are reasons that we haven't been destroyed yet. One is that a gamma ray burst has to be aimed directly at us when it hits. Earth represents a small target. Also, we are protected by a magnetic field that surrounds the Earth like a protective shield. Thank God for that!

The Hubble space telescope has only recently revealed a good deal of what's in the universe. Images from that marvelous instrument have revealed objects out to 13 billion light years. There are galaxies out there that the light from which is only now getting here. In other words we're seeing it as it was back 13 billion years ago. What this means is that we cannot get a true picture of what the universe looks like at present. What we see when we look out there is what it looked like in the past. It's like a time travel photo, an image from the past. We can only speculate as to what the universe looks like now, and remember that the universe is evolving constantly. Stars are being born and dying; galaxies are breaking apart or forming; and alien civilizations could be starting and ending, and we'll never know about them.

The same could be said for us. If our civilization is wiped away, no one out there will even know that we existed. That's why we need to get off this planet and spread out into the cosmos. Besides, I would like to know what's really out there. Wouldn't you?

Thanks for reading.