Astronomers and scientists in general, have known for years that the two galaxies that are satellites of our own, the Large and Small Magellanic galaxies also known as the the Large and Small Magellanic clouds are getting closer to our galaxy. It has been thought for many years that these two smaller galaxies would merge with our own, contrary to a recent article on a respected news site. The reason for this is that the Milky Way is much larger and has a gravitational effect on the other two smaller galaxies. The smaller galaxies are drifting closer and closer until they will someday become one with our own. Scientists have stated that if one galaxy like ours has another pass through it, there will not be many collisions due to the space between stars. Can you imagine these very fast moving objects passing each other. It would make freight trains going in opposite directions seem like nothing. A wispy film of hydrogen gas has been spotted leaving the smaller galaxies and heading in to our own. It is not unusual for gas to be pulled toward us in front of the galaxies. It is turning out to be that there are a lot of things in this universe that are satellites of other things. Some asteroids have tiny objects orbiting them, like moons. Some planets have moons circling around them. Some stars have planets circling them and maybe even other stars. Some galaxies have other galaxies circling around them and so on and so forth. This orbiting structure also exists in the tiniest forms of matter, such as atoms. We exist in a universe where everything seems to be made of things circling things, with the bigger things, the things of greatest mass at the center and the things of lesser mass doing the circling, but this is not always absolutely the case.

We thought that we figured out where planets could exist. That is the conditions that they could exist under, but we are finding out that we were wrong. Planets are popping up in the most unusual places. They have been found not only drifting out in space, but in close double star systems where it was thought that planets could never exist, because of the gravitational conditions there, among other reasons. It now seems that planets can almost exist anywhere. Another area that was thought to be a place where planets could never exist was around very young stars. Three young stars that were so young that they still had dust around them, were found to amazingly also have planets. Scientist believe that these planets are in the same state now as were the planets around our own sun about 4,500 million years ago or 4.5 billion years ago. It took an infrared camera to find the planets among all that dust, but there they were, to the surprise of everyone. Another thing that we are learning is that the planet forming process might happen more than once. Two old stars were found that seem to be undergoing the process of forming new planets. The two stars were believed by astronomers to have had planets orbiting them and it is thought that they expanded and engulfed those planets and now are forming a disc of dust and that new planets might emerge from this. This conclusion is not absolute, but the evidence seems to point to this.

Young Stars

Where does all this lead to? It shows us that there is no stopping planet formation and that it can probably happen more than once from the same star. Wouldn't it be something if we learned that some stars rejuvenated themselves. This would not only prove us wrong in guessing star ages, but it could mean that planets form up to several times in the same general area from the same stars. It just seems that as we learn about these things, the process of discovery speeds along even faster, teaching us about other things that we never even thought of. I would like to say that I wonder what else we don't know about, but that would be ridiculous on the face of it. It could turn out that we know hardly anything even though we think we know a lot. I guess to really figure out how much one knows, he would have to know what is left to know and that is the problem, because this is something that we can never know.

We keep hearing about black holes. These are objects in space that supposedly have such a strong gravitational field that they suck in everything even light, which makes them invisible. That's right, no one has ever seen a black hole. Oh they see material circling something and being drawn in, but is it really a black hole or some kind of super collapsed object that is doing this? It is hard to state for sure that something exists when it has never been seen. Some will argue that we have never seen gravity and that is true, but gravity is not a material object and that is what we are talking about here. There is even a new scientific theory that one scientist has put forth that states that there are no black holes and what is drawing in all that material is a super dense collapsed star. Why couldn't he be right? A scientist named Karl Schwarzchild is credited with developing the concept of black holes in 1916. He theorized that a huge mass would have to be crushed down to the size of an infinitesimal point and didn't think that a star could be crushed down this small. Hey this doesn't mean that he was right, but this theory was accepted by the scientific community. These objects weren't even called black holes, until they were named that by an American physicist named John Wheeler in 1968. Will we find out that either a star can be compressed down this small or that there are other huge bodies in the universe that can? I certainly am not qualified to even guess at this, but that has never stopped me in the past so I will try. I believe that there is much more to the objects that we now call black holes and that they might even be formed by things that we never suspected. One has to remember that what is know as a black hole, comes in all different sizes and this might just indicate that there is some process that can turn almost anything in to one of these monsters.

Quasar

I read on an astronomical website that there are things that exist in space that we will never create on earth. The site talked about neutron stars and black holes. Apparently the site was not keeping up to date with some of the recent events in the scientific field. As I have mentioned before, the new collider being built in Europe, what we used to call an atom smasher, is so powerful that some scientists believe that tiny black holes might be created. I for one certainly hope not. I have stated my reasons before and they are obvious, so I won't bore you and belabor the point again. It might turn out however, that some new type of matter may be found and this matter might just indicate that there could be things out in space that are made of it that could cause extreme gravity in a dense enough object to swallow light. We can never be sure that this won't happen. There are probably many different strange objects in space that we are unaware of. Some might look like ordinary planets and stars while others might seem bizarre to us. Right now objects called Quasars are considered to be one of the strangest class of object. If you saw a Quasar through a telescope, you would think that you were looking at a star. When we talk about Quasars we are talking about quasi-stellar radio sources. Why is a Quasar so strange? One reason is that this one object is brighter than an entire galaxy, but their distance makes them seem ordinary. I would like to go over this info a little closer. The distance of objects is judged by their shift to the red in a spectra. This means that they are moving away and the more the shift to the red, the further away and faster they are moving. If they were approaching us, the shift would be to the blue. This system has come into question by some scientists lately. Certain stars were found to have large red shifts, while the stars that were known to be behind them has less. This just doesn't make any sense if this system is accurate. Taking this a step further, that is how the distance of Quasars was measured and if this is wrong, it might turn out the first hypothesis, the one that said that they were in our own Milky Way galaxy and not as bright as we think, might be right.

The universe seems to be composed of billions upon billions of galaxies. We look at this every day from our perspective on the earth. We are only a very tiny speck of what is out there. The problem with perspective is that it depends on where you are. We think that we know just about where the edge of the entire universe lies. We determined this by looking at stars and galaxies that were further and further away. The formations looked younger and younger to us and this led astronomers to think that if they could look far enough away, they could actually see the very first formations some day. The reason for this is that when we look through a telescope it takes time for the light from the object to reach you. The light you are looking at is old. To illustrate this point, if you were looking at an object, say a galaxy that was 4.5 Billion years away, you would be seeing it as it looked then, not as it is now. You would have to look at it again in a telescope some 4.5 billion years from now to see it as it is today. It might not even be there anymore and you wouldn't know. The telescope is like a time machine in that respect. Even when we observe the planets, we are not seeing them as they are at the exact second in which we are observing them. If a planet is 12 light minutes away, we would see it as it was 12 minutes ago, because the current light would take 12 minutes to reach us. We would always be seeing it in the past. I hope that I have explained this sufficiently so that everyone understands it. If someone was perched on a planet near the edge of the universe, his perspective might be completely different. Who knows what might be visible to him if he looked out in the direction to which we look for the universe's beginning?

Lastly one has to wonder if we are missing the boat on all of this. Scientists believe that the universe has an end, that eventually light will come back to it's starting point, because they believe the universe is curved, like a bubble. Maybe this is true and maybe it is not. It might even be only partially true. I guess it takes a lot of nerve for me to argue this point, because I am going against Einstein who said it was true. When I said it could be partially true, I meant that maybe there are billions upon billions of universes out there all in the form of bubbles and maybe billions of these bubbles belong to a larger structure which in turn is only a tiny part of billions of these structures and so on. It could even be that what is true for the law of physics in our universe, isn't true in all the others. Maybe each one has it's own set of physical laws? As far as not being true, I have to wonder if the universe just goes on forever? There could be a huge void after we get to what we perceive as the beginning, but after that there may or may not be more material. I know that space has some atoms in it, so in reality I can't call it nothing, but it is as close to nothing as I can think of and how can nothing have an end? Taking this a step further, how did nothing have a beginning? In other words, where did all the planets, stars and galaxies come from? Do we all buy the theory that there was some sort of super atom that exploded causing this expansion? If we do, where did that come from? Did you ever notice how closely related this question is with God? The same questions hold true for God as the universe. Doesn't that prove something? Is this a clue that God has left for us?