TIME AND SPACE ESSAY
There was no space before time and there was no time before space. When the Big Bang happened, it was not an explosion as say dynamite or a firecracker. It was an explosion of space and with the beginning of space the beginning of time. It was the beginning of our Universe. We don’t know if there are other Universes that have come and gone or if this is the first and only Universe there ever was and ever will be. We don’t know if our Universe will eventually recollapse in on itself and form another Big Bang making another new Universe. May be our Universe has re-expanded and re-collapsed many times, making new and different Universes each time. There could be mirror Universes of our Universe or there could be opposite Universes of our Universe There could be other Universes with completely different space, time, and physics that are so different that we could never recognize them with different physics than the physics of this Universe.
Someday in the future, as our telescopes get larger and larger, it may be possible to see beyond the faraway galaxies in our Universe and look out of the Universe. Maybe in the great emptiness of nothingness, we will look beyond our Universe and see other Universes. Universes as far as we can see.
We have seen with our telescope in recent years, galaxies at a distance of 13 billion years from us. This light has traveled 13 billion years to reach us. This light is also 13 billion years old. It is a picture of how these galaxies and the Universe appeared 13 billion years ago. is a snapshot of a period long passed if we start at these early galaxies 13 billion years ago and then begin looking at other galaxies that are closer and closer to us, meaning 12 and a half billion light years away, then 12 billion light years away, then 11 and a half billion light years away and 11 and 101/2 and 10 and so on and so on until we’re looking at the closest galaxies to us, say the Andromeda galaxy at 2.2 million light years away, we can watch almost like a movie how the early Universe and galaxies aged into the Universe of today.
“Time” Everyone has heard the saying.” the closer you get to the speed of light, the more slowly time moves.” As an example, a watch worn by someone on an airplane moves slower than a watch worn by someone on the ground. Say an astronaut in a spaceship is traveling close to the speed of light. The astronaut is traveling almost as fast as light travels. Compared to someone on Earth, time is moving much slower for the astronaut though he does not feel it. A minute for the astronaut will be months for the person on Earth. An Astronaut traveling the galaxy for a year according to his or her calendar would return that year to find hundreds of years have passed here on Earth. Future space travelers will know that when they return from their missions, everyone that they knew here on Earth will be long dead, and future generations of humans will welcome them home The years on Earth will speed by from an astronaut’s view as time slows down more the closer the astronaut gets to the speed of light.
Light travels 188.000 miles per second. That is 3/4’s the distance from the Earth to the Moon or 7 1/2 times around the Earth, in one second. In one minute light travels 1180.000 (11 million 160 thousand miles) in an hour light travels 669,600.000 (669 million 800 thousand miles). In a day, a beam of light travels about 13 billion miles. In a year light ravels close to 6,000,000.000.000 (6 trillion) miles A light year is a measure of distance.
Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our solar system (The Sun-solar, the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets system). The alpha Centaur is a three-star system that is 4.2 light years away. The closest of these 3 stars is a star named Proxima Centaur For its distance from us in miles, multiplied by 4.2 light-years x (times) 6,000,000,000,000 miles light travels in a year Alpha Centaury is 25 trillion, 2 hundred billion miles away from us. For stances in the universe, this is only a stone’s throw. In our galaxy there are between 200 billion and 400 billion stars and the closest one to our star the Sun is 25 trillion miles away. Our galaxy is huge, 150 thousand light years in diameter. Farther still are the 500 billion other galaxies
One of the closest galaxies to us is the galaxy Andromeda at 2 million 200 thousand eight years away. The light we see today from Andromeda left Andromeda 2.2 million years ago and traveled through space in that amount of time to reach our telescopes. The farthest galaxies we see today are over 13 billion light years away. The light we see from These far away galaxies is 13 billion years old. It is a picture of how these galaxies and the Universe looked 13 billion years ago which takes us back in time.
These farthest galaxies are moving away from us at tremendous speeds, some close le the speed of light. Where we see these galaxies through our telescopes today, is nowhere near where these galaxies are today. Because 13 billion years ago they were traveling away from us close to the speed of light, today those galaxies are close to 26 billion light years away from us. The problem with seeing them is we won’t see that light for another 26 billion years, the time it takes that light to travel through space to reach us. Oh, What a wonderful Universe it really is.
