My Visit

I recently took a trip to Cornell for a visit to the Synchrotron. The Synchrotron is the particle accelerator that is found there. This machine basically takes small streams of electrons and its antimatter counterparts, positrons, and smashes them together at 99.999995% the speed of light. When matter and their antimatter counterparts collide, they annihilate themselves and create a huge bunch of matter which scientists can use to analyze and prove hypotheses. There are only a few of these accelerators in existence right now for a few reasons. One reason is because these contraptions are massive! The one in Cornell stretches underneath the whole campus and the famous L.H.C. (large hadron collider) in Geneva is much much larger. The LHC is being used by scientists to try and prove the Higgs Boson theory.
Unfortunately, the Cornell Synchrotron is too old to collide particles like they used to. But this retired accelerator is not completely out of business. It is still used for research. The radiation that the collider gives off when it is turned on is a powerful X-ray. This x-ray is used to as a way to look at things at a microscopic level. Many Nobel Prizes in Chemistry were given to people who used the machine for their findings. I am quite lucky to have been able to live so close to this particle accelerator.

ALIENS!!

Do aliens exist? Or is it just a myth? Well my answer to that is yes and no. I only say no because they may not exist as the preconceived notion of E.T. crash landing here and abduction people. Although no one has any tangible proof that aliens exist, there is a possibility that there is life out there. Probably not in the sense that you would believe, however.
Okay, so the universe is a really big place. It is so big that there is a possibility that somewhere, there is a planet, even a solar system almost exactly like ours. Which means the conditions that gave us the chance to prosper could be occurring somewhere else as well. But, there is more of a chance of that happening than there being aliens that have come up with the technology to travel light years away to come abduct the inhabitants of Earth. Another reason there could be aliens out there is because we have proof of other planets having the means to create life in our own solar system. On Mars, we have found traces of where water used to be. Which means that there is a chance that life could be created, at least single-celled organisms, on other worlds.
Of course you could be one of those people who believe that life from other planets have visited us and could be living among us right now or captured in the famous Area 51. For all we know you could be right. Maybe that is why no one knows what is going on in Area 51, or why pictures of strange lights in the sky can be found.
Or you could be a non-believer as well, you could think that planet Earth is a scientific anomaly that could never ever occur again in existence.

How Big is Our Sun?

So we have been taught since kindergarten that our sun is the largest thing in our solar system, but how large is it compared to the rest of the Universe? To be completely honest, it looks like a little pea compared to other stars that we have observed in our solar system. Lets take a little look into these sizes:

The largest known star shown in this video, VY Canis Majoris, is only one of the billions and trillions of stars in our galaxy. This star, would be able to fit 7 billion suns inside it. Now think of the trillions of other galaxies out there that could have stars twice as big as that one! It really puts into perspective about how small and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of the universe.

TIME TRAVEL! The Most Controversial Sci Fi Topic

Alright, because none of this has been proven true, this is all my very own scientific opinion. Time travel seems like an interesting idea. Imagine being able to go back in time and see the world unfold or travel to the far future to see the world end. Pretty awesome right? Well unfortunately, there are limitations to time travel.
So think about travelling in a car down the street, you are travelling in three different dimensions. Time, is the fourth dimension, and so there must be a way to travel faster through it right? Well there is, at least that's what scientists theorize. Everything has a length in time just like they have a length in space. Our length in time is about an average of 80 years. Where particles have an infinite length in time. So there has to be a way to travel through this fourth dimensions. Scientists have theorized that these tiny holes smaller than you can see are breaks in time and space. These are called wormholes, connecting certain points in space and time. If scientists can find a way to enlarge these holes, then time travel would be possible. Unfortunately, you would not be able to choose the destination in time you would like to go. This picture below shows that different points in space time are connected by tiny points. We have yet to find these wormholes so we can only theorize about the existence of them and unfortunately cannot create the technology to enlarge these objects.

God Particle

Now I don't know about you but I remember the time, quite recently, where I heard everyone talking about the Higgs Boson particle and how it was a big deal. But how many people really know about this "God Particle"? Let me give you a little bit of an inside look on it.
The Higgs field is a group of these particles that basically give things mass. Scientists wondered why there are certain particles that have mass and particles that do not have any mass at all. So the "Higgs force carriers" do not affect particles like photons therefore they have no mass. They have just recently discovered the Higgs Boson and proved the Higgs field to be true and explains how everything has mass and why some particles like the top quark has more mass then something that has no mass like a photon.

Antimatter!

Sounds like something that would only come from a strange Sci-Fi movie right? Well you're wrong! Antimatter was created when matter was created at the Big Bang. Antimatter has been defined as the mirror image of matter.So when matter was created, antimatter was created at the exact same time. Imagine a hot metal sheet in a coin factory ('energy'). When you stamp out a coin from a metal sheet, you are left with a coin and a hole in the sheet.You could call this hole an "anticoin". But, you cannot bring matter and antimatter together because when you do, burst back into energy, like putting the coin back into the hole in the sheet. So at the beginning of the Universe, these particles had an all out war against each other and the matter and antimatter annihilating each other.
Why is the Universe not just a burst of energy then you ask? Well for reasons still unknown to scientists, at the beginning, there was a tad bit more matter than antimatter which allowed the matter to overcome the antimatter and when the Universe cooled down enough so that no more matter or antimatter could be created, matter was all that was left and continued to expand and create the universe you see today. The result of the battle can be seen still today because the leftover radiation can be seen all throughout the Universe. This radiation is called Cosmic Background Radiation.

And It All Started With A Big Bang!

So as the insanely catchy theme song for the sitcom "Big Bang Theory" states, the whole universe started in a hot dense state. Then, everything had changed. Because it is impossible to try and recreate the big bang in a lab, scientists can only theorize about what had happened. This theory came to be because of the Hubble telescope. Through this telescope, scientists were able to see that entire galaxies were moving away from us at a very rapid speed. The explosion from the big bang could have only been the only thing that would have caused that. The most amazing thing is that the explosion was only there for a very short time. In fact it only took about one second for the building blocks of the universe to form.

This picture calls that the Big Freeze Out. Then, 12-15 billion years later, our Universe as we see it today is in existence.

Okay, What Is Really Going On With Black Holes?

Where do they come from?

As I touched upon the other day, a black hole forms from a dead/dying stars. The star burns up the fuel that it needs to support the reactions that it creates. This causes the star to fall back in on itself. If the star is massive enough, it will pull other things towards it as well, almost like pulling a plug in a drain. This is a black hole.

What would happen if you got sucked into one of these bad boys?

Well, you would die... However assuming you could survive going past the "event horizon", where everything starts to get pulled in by the black hole, you would get stretched into infinity due to the tremendous difference of gravity at each point of your body.

Other theories about what would happen?

Another theory is that black holes could supposedly be time warps to other parts of space and time. These could be used as shortcuts to other parts of space. Unfortunately, no evidence has been brought to the table that this could actually happen, or if it could we would not be able to survive the trip.

Death Of A Star

How Does A Star Die?
When a star does not have the money to pay off his debt to the Star Mafia, they tend to "disappear for a while".... Not really.

Actually a star "dies" when they run out of nuclear fuel that allows for the constant nuclear reactions. This causes them to lose a lot of their matter. Small stars typically collapse on themselves and compress into small core that eventually cools and turns into a White Dwarf. Larger stars tend to burn hotter and faster. So, when their nuclear fuel runs out, the star ends up losing its matter from massive explosions known as supernovas. After this explosion, the star's gravity causes it to collapse back in on itself pulling it and everything near it in towards itself. This creates the effect known as a black hole. Black Holes are a big topic by themselves so I won't get to into it right now. The act of a dying star is a fascinating occurrence.In fact, many of the stars that we see in the night sky could already be dead! The stars are so far away that the light from them thousands of years ago are just getting here.

Sound! ... Or lack there of...

Alright, so the common misconception here that I am trying to clarify has been a bother to both me and a certain physics teacher of mine. This myth is about sound in space. Now in the movies, ever since 2001: A Space Odyssey, movies that deal with scenes in space included sounds and noises of rockets and whatnot. That is not scientifically accurate however. The reason for this is because the sound waves that we hear travel through particles in the air in order to reach our eardrums. In space, there are no particles between objects so the sound waves from your voice will not go anywhere. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, it was the first movie released that stuck with the fact that there would be no sound in space. Unfortunately, the movie received horrible reviews! The people were upset that there was no sound in those scenes. Which is why Hollywood has used sound every time after that.

So if my friend Mr. Lavere wanted to tell me yet again one of his punderful jokes, all I would have to do to get away from him would be to hop on the nearest rocket out of this world.

The Universe is full of what we would think of as anomalies here on Earth. But surely the lack of sound is one of them. This would prove true the age old sentiment, "In space, no one can hear you scream!" Mwahahaha. 

The Take Off

Alright so let's get down to what you are really here for. You are here to read about all the fun things the Universe has to bring you.... I know, exciting right?... Well what I want to show you is all the interesting facts that space has to offer. I also am trying to explain common misconceptions and answer any questions that may be out there in the world. Movies often include scenes being held in space. I can tell you how physically accurate the scene is and what parts of the scene are just in there for "movie effects". Because I am no expert, it brings up advantages and disadvantages to this blog. Obviously the big disadvantage is that I do not have knowledge about the entire Universe. (Actually, to be honest nobody on Earth really does know all about the Universe. It's kind of impossible.) However, the advantage to it is I can give a personalized explanation of it. So just sit back, relax and and learn something new as we travel from the world we know of to far off and new places!