The Universe is bigger, more violent,
more mysterious and more wonderous than you can ever imagine...
and then some.
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One terrible day ...billion of years from now...
our Sun will run out of fuel and burn out. As the Sun grows old, it will expand. As the core runs out of hydrogen and then helium, the core will contact and the outer layers will expand, cool, and become less bright. It will then become a Red Giant Star.
The WMAP spacecraft sits about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, or four times the distance to the Moon. It hovers around a point of gravitational stability between the Earth and Sun. From this stable perch, going around the Sun in synch with Earth's orbit, WMAP has an unobstructed view of the sky, with the Sun, Earth and Moon always to its back. It is also free of interfering magnetic fields and microwave emissions nearer to Earth. For more about the WMAP go to Space.com or visit the WMAP web-site listed to the right of this piece.
Tit-bit-of-info
In 1054 Chinese astronomers saw a massive explosion in the sky, but what was it? If you look at the same patch of sky today you can see the cloud of glowing gas we call the Crab Nebula. We now know this to be the remnant of a supernova, a giant star that exploded hundreds of years ago - the very same star the early Chinese recorded.
Supernovas occur in Galaxies across the Universe but for many years everyone assumed that our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, was relatively quiet. Now something hugely disturbing has been found lurking at its core. It’s a super massive Black Hole 3 million times bigger than our Sun - but for something so huge it’s been surprisingly hard to find!
The Violent Universe page of this site covers more of the violence in our Universe.
Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2-a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in 55 languages.
The Universe
So, How big is the Universe?
To quote Carl Sagan The exact size of the Universe is unknown, but scientists believe that the Universe is still expanding outward. They believe that this expansion is the result of a powerful explosion that occurred 13.7 billion years ago. This event is what's commonly called the Big Bang. The Big Bang
The Big Bang set off a train of reactions that continue to this day. To say that it was an explosion is misleading, there was no explosion as we imagine an explosion to be ie. big noise following a big flash of light. So, one might ask, where and in what did the singularity, or the Big Bang, or whatever one might call, it appear, if not in space? What was going on before the Big Bang we may never know. It is important to know however, that the Big Bang theory itself is constantly being revised. As more observations are made and more research conducted, the Big Bang theory becomes more complete and our knowledge of the origins of the Universe grows.
SETI and WMAP
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Edwin Hubble
The origin of the Big Bang Theory can be credited to one man...Edwin Hubble. He made the observation that the Universe is continuously expanding, and discovered that a Galaxy's velocity is proportional to its distance. Galaxies that are twice as far from us move twice as fast. Another consequence is that the Universe is expanding in every direction. This observation means that it has taken every Galaxy the same amount of time to move from a common starting position to its current position. Just as the Big Bang provided for the foundation of the Universe.
Tit-bit-of-info
To find out more about Greek astronomy you might like to visit This Greek Astronomy website that I stumbled upon. Or How the Greeks used astronomy and Geometry to study the heavens by a guy called Mark Fowler of the University of Virginia.
In the Autum of 1977 Voyager 1 and 2 were launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida with great expectations and hope. But even the best minds of the day could not have anticipated just how sucessful the missions would be.
To accomplish their two-planet mission, the spacecraft were built to last five years. As the spacecraft flew across the solar system, remote-control reprogramming was used to endow the Voyagers with greater capabilities than they possessed when they left the Earth. Their two-planet mission became 4. Their 5-year lifetimes stretched to 12 and is now over 30 years. Eventually, between them, Voyager 1 and 2 would explore all the giant outer planets of our solar system, 48 of their moons, and the unique systems of rings and magnetic fields those planets possess. Had the Voyager mission ended after the Jupiter and Saturn flybys alone, it still would have provided the material to rewrite astronomy textbooks. But having doubled their already ambitious itineraries, the Voyagers returned to Earth information over the years that has revolutionized the science of planetary astronomy, helping to resolve key questions while raising intriguing new ones about the origin and evolution of the planets in our solar system. Voyager 1 has crossed into the heliosheath and is leaving the solar system, rising above the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 35 degrees at a rate of about 520 million kilometers (about 320 million miles) a year. Voyager 2 is also headed out of the solar system, diving below the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 48 degrees and a rate of about 470 million kilometers (about 290 million miles) a year.
I do hope that you find the-universe.ie web-site interesting, educational and awesome.
Apologies for the conservative-type nature of the site (no flashes, bleeps, bangs or whistles here) but as a complete novice and fully admitting to total confusion on understanding the code (despite using Dreamweaver, tons of Googling, ten months of my life and one of those Dummies books that you'd still need a degree to understand) I still found myself tied up in knots.
After a lot of hassle I eventually managed to place one of those nifty little youtube films onto the contact & more page (see center panel).
Your help, comments, suggestions etc would be most appreciated.
Lastly enjoy your Life, the Universe has gone through so much to enable you to be.
About me
I live in County Kerry, Ireland. The skies in my part of the world are very dark once you go outside the little village that I live in. I've loved the whole Astronomy thing ever since I was a child. Don't actually know where it came from though, there was certainly no encouragement or interest of the subject in my family ...I think they must have all thought me nuts and left me at it...shur what harm was I doing!
In these awkward times I think that the only hope for us all is in humanity heading for the Stars...or at least the planets. Of course it would need the total co-operation of every government...they have the money all they need is the will to do so.
This website is me playing my part in bringing the wonders of The Universe to the world of those who care about such things.
Latest News
Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the Sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the Sun's magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate.
For more go to the NASA Website
Our Galaxy
Our Galaxy is the Milky Way Galaxy, but there are many billions of other Galaxies, the most famous of which is our nearest neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy. Each Galaxy is a system composed of different star systems, stellar remains and other interstellar stuff. Astronomers estimate that there are 100 billion galaxies in our Universe.
Tit-bit of info:
A car traveling at the motorway speed of 75 miles per hour would reach Mars in 80 years, Jupiter in 600 years, Saturn in 1,200 years and our nearest neighbor star Alpha Centuri in a whopping 38,000,000 years.
Highly recommended DVD
The History Channel's brilliant series The Universe series is a must for all lovers of Astronomy.And of course Carl Sagan's series 'The Cosmos' is a definate must see.
