The picture is from the Hubble Space Telescope, peering into one of the “dark areas” of the universe. Every light you see is not a single star but rather an entire galaxy. Using the Hubble telescope, astronomers have established that there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. With the introduction of the new far more sophisticated James Webb telescope, scientist expect to at least triple the number of known galaxies. Our own galaxy, The Milky Way, a rather normal sized galaxy, is estimated to contain between 100 and 250 billion stars. Again, the astronomers estimate of “the known” universe contains at least one billion trillion stars….and “the known” is about to become much bigger.
Of course, the universe isn’t really getting any bigger at all. At least not in the infinitesimal time frame of man’s place in the universe. However big the Universe is, which many believe to be without beginning or end, it has always been only man’s limited ability to view it that has grown. All those trillions of stars, not to mention the planets and moons and who knows what else are each living their own life spans. Birthing, expanding, and evolving then dying to create material for some new purpose under heaven.
One of those materials created in the life span of the ever-changing universe is an invisible high energy particle which we call a cosmic ray. These particles traveling through our universe near the speed of light “are atomic nuclei stripped of their atoms.” This occurs during the life spans of those billions of trillions of stars. These invisible cosmic rays bounce around the universe subject to the magnetic push and pull of planets, stars, and galaxies. An endless stream of unseen energy particles which interact with the living universe in manifold and, as yet little understood ways. Who knows perhaps these cosmic rays may one day be harnessed to generate an eternal power source for us Earthlings or perhaps become the fuel for interplanetary travel? We do know that these invisible cosmic rays interact with particles and aerosols in the Earth’s atmosphere to seed cloud formation and clouds are the least understood of all aspects of how the Earth’s climate is regulated. Like the Universe itself we understand not a fraction of both cosmic rays potential and secrets.
When scientist tell you that the “science is settled” remember the invisible cosmic ray which were not even known until the twentieth century, or the trillions of stars that most of mankind’s population never even dreamed existed and the trillions more we are about to discover. The science is never settled, science is not and never has been a process of conclusion only one of discovery. Scientists are not inventors, they are explorers, exploring a universe they did not create and will never truly understand. By the way inside the invisible little cosmic ray are “other sub-atomic particles like neutrons electrons and neutrinos.” And what might we find inside of them? Perhaps an entire universe?
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