Did you ever wonder how strange our world is? Take a step back and look at things. First of all we have continents that are in a sea of water and they move. Sure the movement is slow, if we use the time scale of human life to judge them. So how fast do the continents travel? It is estimated that they move at the speed of about 2 inches a year It is a funny thing about this figure, there are all different estimates of continental speed. I think that science will get a better handle on this now that we have GPS and such. What the 2 inch speed means, is that if a person lives to be 72 years old, the continent he or she was born on would have moved a distance of about 12 feet in that time. It is hard to think of the land that we have our homes on and we travel on every day as moving, but not only does the land move, we have to remember that our entire planet is spinning and moving around the Sun. There is a lot of movement of this world of ours and yet, most of us never notice it at all. Have you ever wondered why planets spin? Actually that is not an easy thing to explain so it can be understood by everyone, but I will try my best. When a nebula that is large and has a slight spin shrinks down to the size of a solar system, this is a huge change in what is known as Angular Momentum. That energy has to go somewhere and it is this energy that makes the planets spin. It is said that if a nebula has no spin at all, then even if a star is formed, it will have no planets Planets form outside of a protostellar disk, which itself forms only because of the initial angular momentum of the cloud. As with everything scientific, it may turn out some day that there is more to this than we now know. We are not aware of any law of rotation or anything like that.

We know that the Earth is rotating, but how come we can't feel this rotation? One of the reasons is that gravity is a much stronger force than the centripetal force generated by the spin. Years ago nobody believed that the earth was actually rotating . In 1851 an experiment was conducted in the Meridien room of the Paris Observatory, it was a public exhibition by a scientist named Faucault. He had hung a pendulum from the ceiling, but this is not the experiment he is remembered for. That experiment took place about three weeks later when he hung a heavyweight from a wire that was 67 m long and connected to the dome of the Parthenon in Paris. The pendulum did not remain steady, it swung outward 11° creating a full circle in 32 hours which proved that the earth was indeed rotating. Scientists knew in 1851 that the earth was rotating, but this was the first experiment that actually allowed everyone to see that rotation. As we know the earth is not only spinning, but it is rotating around the sun. The solar system, and in our particular case, is headed out of the galaxy. The galaxy itself is also traveling. When you think about it, there is a tremendous amount of energy in the universe from all the spinning and moving objects and I haven't even begun to talk about objects that are putting out tremendous amounts of energy on their own. Where does all this energy go? Some now say that it goes into a different dimension and it is there that we can find It for our own use. Such people as John Hutchison, the famous Canadian inventor who discovered the Hutchison effect, is one among many who believe this.

Our world is constantly being bombarded by all kinds of rays. We have all been told since we were children that the Earth's atmosphere totally blocks almost all of the rays that hit the Earth from this constant bombardment. .Did you ever wonder what the atmosphere would be like, if it wasn't subject to this constant bombardment? One of the things that cosmic rays do when they hit the atmosphere is release energy that increases the pressure of the atmosphere over certain parts of the earth where the strikes are the heaviest. To prove this point, experimental stations have been set up that measure this pressure and it is readily discernible. Apparently if cosmic rays were not striking the atmosphere there would be somewhat less pressure, but we are not talking about great amounts here. Not all the energy that reaches the Earth is shielded from us. The energy reaching us from our own sun is one of the main determining factors in our planet's climate. So even though we are almost totally shielded from cosmic rays, some of the sun's rays get through and this is very fortunate for life on this earth, because if they didn't get through, the earth would just be a barren rock and probably a frozen world. It is amazing when you think about it, our atmosphere is acting as a sort of selective filter, what are the odds on that? Maybe we will find that this is what makes the difference between lifeless planet's and planets that have life on them, assuming others exist.

When we think of light, most of us never think about light that is not visible. Light from x-rays is coming at us from many different objects and sources in space. If we had x-ray vision we would see a lot more when we looked out into the heavens, than we can see now. Many astronomers believe that one of the causes of x-rays is extremely high temperatures When I talk about high temperatures I am not talking about temperatures on the order of thousands of degrees that can melt metal or even hundreds of thousands of degrees, but rather temperatures of millions of degrees. It makes you wonder how something can get this hot doesn't it? It just so happens that there are things out there that can do this, such as very strong magnetic or gravitational fields. Even these methods are not the only methods for creating such superheated plasmas and such. There are explosions out there, explosions of such tremendous force that our purely human minds can not even imagine. One type of such an explosion would be a nova .A nova is an exploding star. Try and picture this in your mind, an object the size of a sun, which by the way is not particularly large for a star, blowing up. I don't think we would even be able to grasp the enormity of the explosion. X-rays are also produced on the surface of the sun and inside black holes. As you can see there are many sources for x-rays in this universe and I have not even cited all the known ones. The Earth's atmosphere is so good at blocking x-rays, that astronomers have to put x-ray detection instruments into space to see x-ray objects and x-ray sources.

There are even natural radio sources out in space. One of the sources is called a quasar. Most scientists believe that quasars are very distant objects, but some feel that the test we apply to determine distance is flawed. We use a test called the red shift. It is believed that the faster an object is traveling away from us, the redder its light will look on the spectrum. One of the reasons that some scientists are now questioning this method is that some objects that have been found that seem to be behind quasars are registering a red shift that would make them much closer than the quasar itself. Scientists believe that these radio signals coming from quasars are nothing more than radio signatures of a rapidly rotating object in space. It is believed that these objects rotate thousands of times a second. Some people have reported that quasars are receding from us at a speed faster than that of light. This in itself makes the measuring modality that we use suspect. The reason for this is that Einstein's theory of relativity states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. There are other objects that are giving out radio waves and one of these is a pulsar. People get confused between a Quasar and Pulsar. Quasars are thought to be at the center of galaxies along with black holes that might be as large as a billion solar masses. Pulsars are much smaller objects and not a black hole.

One of the things that is really strange about our universe, as far as astronomers are concerned, is the fact that the universe is accelerating its expansion. This seems to indicate that the theory of the Big Bang is wrong. If that theory was correct, the expansion should be slowing down and eventually the universe should collapse in on itself again and ultimately there should be another Big Bang. In the last few years studies have been made on this expansion and they prove it just keeps accelerating. This is not the only strange thing that is going on, there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy that is at least two and a half million times as massive as a sun. This black hole is gobbling up stars and gas and any thing that comes within its range. It is a giant swirling mass which should be creating a lot of friction and heat and it should be putting out a very bright visible light, along with x-rays and yet it is very faint, how is this possible? Nobody is sure of the reason for this phenomena . Another thing that has been found in the universe that is really stumping astronomers is the fact that we are now finding many tiny asteroids that have even tinier Moonlit's orbiting them .One asteroid which is only 90 miles wide has a tiny moon 1/10 of that size orbiting at. The reason that the scientists are confused is that they claim that there is not enough mass for a rock this size to hold a companion in place. It is not only the fact that the bigger object has a very weak gravity field, but because most of these are irregular shapes, the gravity field itself is uneven. This makes it even harder for an object to maintain a satellite. Even the sun itself presents a problem for scientists, let me explain why. If you build a fire, the closer to it you get the warmer you get. If you want to climb into the fire that would be its hottest point and you would burn up. The sun is not like this, the body of the sun is much cooler in the middle. As you travel outward from inside the Sun, things begin to get hotter until you reach the suns atmosphere which is called the Corona and is the hottest part. So there is the dilemma for the scientists, how can the atmosphere of the sun be hotter than the sun?

There are just so many things happening in the universe that we can't understand right now, for example the Earth is being bombarded by a certain type of extremely high energy cosmic ray, unlike those that we receive from within our galaxy every day. So far we have not been able to determine where these rays come from, making them just another mystery. So you see we are surrounded by many mysteries and there are probably a lot more that we don't know about yet. We are constantly bombarded by all sorts of rays and yet most of us don't even know it. .One cannot help but feel that the conditions on Earth, as complex as they all are to allow us to live here, cannot result from mere chance. You have to wonder what the odds would be on a place being created this perfect in the middle of a hostile universe? I can't help but believe that there must be other intelligent life in the universe, just because of the sheer amount of stars and probably planets that exist out there, but having said that I also realize that it may not be as numerous as most people believe. I only say this because the odds are so tremendous on there being another Earth like planet that has all the features of our world. It just might turn out that there are only a few worlds in each galaxy that are capable of life. I guess we will just have to wait and see on this one.