Guide to Space Archives

March 13, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

How Do You Jumpstart A Dead Star?

It’s a staple of science fiction, restarting our dying star with some kind of atomic superbomb. Why is our Sun running out of fuel, and what can we actually do to get it restarted?

Stars die. Occasionally threatening the Earth and its civilization in a variety plot devices in science fiction. Fortunately there’s often a Bruce Willis coming in to save the day, delivering a contraption, possibly riding a giant bomb shaped like a spaceship, to the outer proximity of our dying Sun that magically fixes the broken star and all humanity is saved.

Is there any truth in this idea? If our Sun dies, can we just crack out a giant solar defibrillator and shock it back into life? Not exactly.

First, let’s review at how stars die. Our Sun is halfway through its life. It’s been going for about 4.5 billion years, and in 5 billion years it’ll use up all the hydrogen in its core, bloat up as a red giant, puff off its outer layers and collapse down into a white dwarf.

Is there a point in there, anywhere, that we could get it back to acting like a sun? Technically? Yes. Did you know it will only use up a fraction of its fuel during its lifetime? Only in the core of the Sun are the temperatures and pressures high enough for fusion reactions to take place. This region extends out to roughly 25% of the radius, which only makes up about 2% of the volume.

Outside the core is the radiative zone, where fusion doesn’t take place. Here, the only way gamma radiation can escape is to be absorbed and radiated countless times, until it reaches the next layer of the Sun: the convective zone. Here temperatures have dropped to the point that the whole region acts like a giant lava lamp. Huge blobs of superheated stellar plasma rise up within the star and release their energy into space. This radiative zone acts like a wall, keeping the potential fuel in the convective zone away from the fusion furnace.

Cutaway to the Interior of the Sun. Credit: NASA

So, if you could connect the convective zone to the solar core, you’d be able to keep mixing up the material in the Sun. The core of the Sun would be able to efficiently fuse all the hydrogen in the star.

Sound crazy? Interestingly, this already happens in our Universe. For red dwarf stars with less than 35% the mass of the Sun, their convective zones connect directly to the core of the star. This is why these stars can last for hundreds of billions and even trillions of years. They will efficiently use up all the hydrogen in the entire star thanks to the mixing of the convective zone. If we could create a method to break through the radiative zone and get that fresh hydrogen into the core of the Sun, we could keep basking in its golden tanning rays for well past its current expiration date.

I never said it would be easy. It would take stellar engineering at a colossal scale to overcome the equilibrium of the star. A future civilization with an incomprehensible amount of energy and stellar engineering ability might be able to convert our one star into a collection of fully convective red dwarf stars. And these could sip away their hydrogen for trillions of years.

Tell us in the comments on how you think we should go about it. My money is on giant ‘magic bullet’ blender” or a perhaps a Dyson solar juicer.

March 12, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

What Is The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation?

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is the afterglow of the Big Bang; one of the strongest lines of evidence we have that this event happened. UCLA’s Dr. Ned Wright explains.

“Ok, I’m Ned Wright, and I’m a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, and I work on infrared astronomy and cosmology.”

How useful is the cosmic microwave background radiation?

“Well, the most important information we get is from the cosmic microwave background radiation come from, at the lowest level, is it’s existence. When I started in astronomy, it wasn’t 100 percent certain that the Big Bang model was correct. And so with the prediction of a cosmic microwave background from the Big Bang and the prediction of no cosmic microwave background from the competing theory, the steady state, that was a very important step in our knowledge.”

“And then the second aspect of the cosmic microwave background that is very important, is that it’s spectrum is extremely similar to a black body. And so, by being a black body means that universe relatively smoothly transitioned from being opaque to being transparent, and then we actually see effectively an isothermal cavity when we look out, so it looks very close to a black body.”

“And the fact that we are moving through the universe can be measured very precisely by looking at what is called the dipole anisotropy of the microwave background. So one side of the sky is slightly hotter (about 3 millikelvin hotter) and one side of the sky – the opposite side of the sky – is slightly colder (about 3 millikelvin colder), so that means that we are moving at approximately a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. And in fact we now know very precisely what that value is – it’s about 370 kilometers per second. So that’s our motion, the solar system’s motion, through the universe.”

“An then the final piece of information we’re getting from the microwave background now, in fact the Planck satellite just gave us more information along these lines is measurement of the statistical pattern of the very small what I call anisotropies or little bumps and valleys in the temperature. So in addition to the 3 millikelvin difference, we actually have plus or minus 100 microkelvin difference in the temperature from different spots. And so, when you look at these spots, and look at their detailed pattern, you can actually see a very prominent feature, which is there’s about a one and a half degree preferred scale, and that’s what’s caused by the acoustic
waves that are set up by the density perturbations early in the history of the universe, and how far they could travel before the universe became transparent. And that’s a very strong indicator about the universe.”

What does it tell us about dark energy?

“The cosmic microwave background actually has this pattern on a half degree scale, and that gives you effectively a line of position, as you have with celestial navigation where you get a measurement of one star with a sextant, then you get a line on the map where you are. But you can look at the same pattern – the acoustic wave setup in the universe, and you see that in the galaxy’s distribution a lot more locally. We’re talking about galaxies, so it might be a billion light years away, but to cosmologists, that’s local. And these galaxies also show the same wave-like pattern, and you can measure that angle at scale locally and compare it to what you see in history and that gives you the crossing line of position. And that really tells us where we are in the universe, and how much stuff there is and it tells us that we have this dark energy which nobody really understands what it is, but we know what it’s doing. It’s making the universe accelerate in it’s expansion.”

March 10, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

How Will Aliens Find Us?

Trying to keep a low profile, to prevent the aliens from invading? Bad news. Life has actually been broadcasting our existence to the Universe for hundreds of millions of years.

Have you heard these crazy plans to send signals out into deep space? What if evil aliens receive them, come steal our water, enslave, eat, and use us as guinea pigs for their exotic probulators. How we could stop these madmen from announcing our presence to the galaxy? A petition on whitehouse.gov? An all caps Facebook group? An all pusheen protest? Somebody call Reddit, they’ll know what to do.

If this is a worry for you and your friends, I’ve got bad news, or possibly good news depending on which side you come down on. We’ve already been broadcasting our existence for hundreds of millions of years. If aliens wanted to know we were here, all they needed to do was look through their telescopes.

We’re in a golden age of extrasolar planet discovery, recently crossing the thousand-planets-mark thanks to Kepler and other space telescopes. With all these amazing planetary candidates, our next challenge will be to study the atmospheres of these planets, searching for evidence of life. There are chemicals which are naturally occurring, like water and carbon dioxide, and there are substances that can only be present if some source is replenishing them. Methane, for example, would only last only few hundred years in the atmosphere if it wasn’t for farting cows and colonies of bacteria eating dead things.

If we see methane or oxygen in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet, we’ll have a good idea there’s life there. And if we see the byproducts of an industrial civilization, like air pollution, we can pinpoint exactly where they are in their technical development. It will work for us, and that means it would work for aliens.

For the first few billion years, oxygen was toxic. But then cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis and figured out how to work with oxygen more than 2.4 billion years ago. This is known as the Great Oxidation Event.

For the first billion years, all this biologically generated oxygen was absorbed by the oceans and the rocks. Once those oxygen sinks filled up, oxygen began accumulating in the atmosphere. By 500 million years ago, there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support the kind of breathing we do today. And this much oxygen would have been obvious to the aliens. They would have known that life had evolved here on Earth, and they could have sent out their berserker spaceships to steal our water and made us watch while they ate all our small rodents.

If the aliens waited, we would have given them more signs. The Industrial Revolution began in the mid 1700’s. And this time, it was humans that filled the atmosphere with the pollution of our industrial processes. Again, aliens watching the planet with their space telescopes would know the moment we became a technological civilization.

The innermost antennae along the north arm of the Very Large Array, superimposed upon a false-color representation of a radio (red) and optical (blue) image of the radio galaxy 3C31. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

In the 20th century, we harnessed the power of radio transmissions, and began sending our messages out into space. For about a hundred years now, our transmissions have been expanding into a bubble of space. And so, any aliens listening within this expanding sphere of space might have a chance of hearing us. They know we’re here, and they know some of us really like Ke$ha.

And finally, for the last few decades, a few groups have tried broadcasting messages using our powerful radio telescopes directly at other stars. These messages haven’t gotten very far, but I honestly wouldn’t worry. Life itself gave away our position hundreds of millions of years ago. And life will help us find other civilizations, if they’re out there.

What do you think? Should we turn out the lights and pretend like we’re not home or keep on actively broadcasting our presence to the Universe? Tell us what you think we should do in the comments below.

March 6, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Why Is This A Special Time For The Universe?

You might be surprised to know that you’re living in a very special time in the Universe. And in the far future, our descendant astronomers will wish they could live in such an exciting time Let’s find out why.

You might be interested to know that you are living in a unique important and special time in the age of the Universe. Our view of the night sky won’t be around forever, in fact, as we think about the vast time that lies ahead, our time in the Universe will sound very special.

Astronomers figure the Universe has been around for 13.8 billion years. Everything in the entire Universe was once collected together into a singularity of space and time. And then, in a flash, Big Bang. Within a fraction of a second, the fundamental forces of the Universe came into existence, followed by the earliest types of matter and energy. For a few minutes, the entire Universe was like a core of a star, fusing hydrogen into helium. Approximately 377,000 years after the Big Bang, the entire Universe had cooled to the point that it became transparent. We see this flash of released light as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

Over the next few billion years, the first stars and galaxies formed, leading to the large scale structures of the Universe. These new galaxies with their furious star formation would have been an amazing sight. It would have been a very special time in the Universe, but it’s not our time.

Over the next few billion years, the Universe continued to expand. And it was during this time that the mysterious force called dark energy crept in, further driving the expansion of the Universe. We don’t know what dark energy is, but we know it’s a constant pressure that’s accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

As the volume of the Universe increases, the rate of its expansion increases. And over vast periods of time, it’ll make the Universe unrecognizable from what we see today. The further we look out into space, the faster galaxies are moving away from us. There are galaxies moving away from us faster than the speed of light. In other words, the light from those galaxies will never reach us.

The Universe 1.9 billion years after the Big Bang. Credit: Alvaro Orsi, Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University.

As dark energy increases, more and more galaxies will cross this cosmic horizon, invisible to us forever. And so, we can imagine a time in the far future, where the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation has been stretched away until it’s undetectable. And eventually there will be a time when there will be no other galaxies visible in the night sky. Future astronomers will see a Universe without a cosmological history. There will be no way to know that there was ever a Big Bang, that there was ever a large scale structure to the Universe.

So how long will this be? According to Dr. Lawrence Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer, in as soon as 100 billion years, there will be no way to see other galaxies and calculate their velocity away from us. That sounds like a long time, but there are red dwarf stars that could live for more than a trillion years. We will have lost our history forever.

Cherish and make the most of these next hundred billion years. Keep our history alive and remember to tell our great great grandchildren and their robotic companions the tales of a time when we knew about the Big Bang.

What about you? What would you go see if you could witness any astronomical event in the history of the universe?

March 4, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

How Do You Kill a Black Hole?

Black holes want to absorb all matter and energy in the Universe. It’s just a matter of time. So what can we do to fight back? What superweapons have been devised to destroy black holes?

Black holes are the natural enemies of all spacefaring races. With their bottomless capacity to consume all light and matter, it’s just a few septillion years before all things in the Universe have found their way into the cavernous maw of a black hole, crushed into the infinitely dense singularity. If Star Trek has taught us anything, it’s that it’s mankind’s imperative to survive against all odds.

So will we take this lying down?
Heck no!

Will we strike first and destroy the black holes before they destroy us?
Heck yes!

But how? How could you kill a black hole?
This… gets a little tricky.
Continue reading “How Do You Kill a Black Hole?”

March 3, 2014December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Who Discovered Electricity?

Electricity pylon near Colliers Wood tube station, London. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Electricity is a form of energy and it occurs in nature, so it was not “invented.” As to who discovered it, many misconceptions abound. Some give credit to Benjamin Franklin for discovering electricity, but his experiments only helped establish the connection between lightning and electricity, nothing more.

The truth about the discovery of electricity is a bit more complex than a man flying his kite. It actually goes back more than two thousand years.

In about 600 BC, the Ancient Greeks discovered that rubbing fur on amber (fossilized tree resin) caused an attraction between the two – and so what the Greeks discovered was actually static electricity. Additionally, researchers and archeologists in the 1930’s discovered pots with sheets of copper inside that they believe may have been ancient batteries meant to produce light at ancient Roman sites. Similar devices were found in archeological digs near Baghdad meaning ancient Persians may have also used an early form of batteries.

A replica and diagram of one of the ancient electric cells (batteries) found near Bagdad.

But by the 17th century, many electricity-related discoveries had been made, such as the invention of an early electrostatic generator, the differentiation between positive and negative currents, and the classification of materials as conductors or insulators.

In the year 1600, English physician William Gilbert used the Latin word “electricus” to describe the force that certain substances exert when rubbed against each other. A few years later another English scientist, Thomas Browne, wrote several books and he used the word “electricity” to describe his investigations based on Gilbert’s work.

Who Discovered Electricity — Benjamin Franklin. Image Source: Wikipedia

In 1752, Ben Franklin conducted his experiment with a kite, a key, and a storm. This simply proved that lightning and tiny electric sparks were the same thing.

Italian physicist Alessandro Volta discovered that particular chemical reactions could produce electricity, and in 1800 he constructed the voltaic pile (an early electric battery) that produced a steady electric current, and so he was the first person to create a steady flow of electrical charge. Volta also created the first transmission of electricity by linking positively-charged and negatively-charged connectors and driving an electrical charge, or voltage, through them.

In 1831 electricity became viable for use in technology when Michael Faraday created the electric dynamo (a crude power generator), which solved the problem of generating electric current in an ongoing and practical way. Faraday’s rather crude invention used a magnet that was moved inside a coil of copper wire, creating a tiny electric current that flowed through the wire. This opened the door to American Thomas Edison and British scientist Joseph Swan who each invented the incandescent filament light bulb in their respective countries in about 1878. Previously, light bulbs had been invented by others, but the incandescent bulb was the first practical bulb that would light for hours on end.

Replica of Thomas Edison's first lightbulb. Credit: National Park Service. — Replica of Thomas Edison’s first lightbulb. Credit: National Park Service.

Swan and Edison later set up a joint company to produce the first practical filament lamp, and Edison used his direct-current system (DC) to provide power to illuminate the first New York electric street lamps in September 1882.

Later in the 1800’s and early 1900’s Serbian American engineer, inventor, and all around electrical wizard Nikola Tesla became an important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity. He worked with Edison and later had many revolutionary developments in electromagnetism, and had competing patents with Marconi for the invention of radio. He is well known for his work with alternating current (AC), AC motors, and the polyphase distribution system.

Later, American inventor and industrialist George Westinghouse purchased and developed Tesla’s patented motor for generating alternating current, and the work of Westinghouse, Tesla and others gradually convinced American society that the future of electricity lay with AC rather than DC.

Others who worked to bring the use of electricity to where it is today include Scottish inventor James Watt, Andre Ampere, a French mathematician, and German mathematician and physicist George Ohm.

And so, it was not just one person who discovered electricity. While the concept of electricity was known for thousands of years, when it came time to develop it commercially and scientifically, there were several great minds working on the problem at the same time.

We have written many articles about electricity for Universe Today. Here’s a separate article about static electricity, and here’s an interesting story about how astronomy was part of how electricity was brought to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933.

For more detailed information about the discovery of electricity, see our sources, below.

We’ve also recorded an entire episode of Astronomy Cast all about Electromagnetism. Listen here, Episode 103: Electromagnetism.

Sources:
Wikipedia: Electricity
Electricity Forum
A Short History of Ancient Electricity
Wise Geek
Wikipedia: Alessandro Volta
Wikipedia: Michael Faraday
Wikipedia: Thomas Edison
Wikipedia: Nikola Tesla
Wikipedia: Guglielmo Marconi

February 24, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Can Moons Have Moons?

The Earth has a single moon, while Saturn has more than 60, with new moons being discovered all the time. But here’s a question, can a moon have a moon? Can that moon’s moon have its own moon? Can it be moons all the way down?

First, consider that we have a completely subjective idea of what a moon is. The Moon orbits the Earth, and the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, which orbits within the Local Group, which is a part of the Virgo Supercluster. The motions of objects in the cosmos act like a set of Russian nesting dolls, with things orbiting things, which orbit other things. So maybe a better question is: could any of the moons in the Solar System have moons of their own? Well actually, one does.

Right now, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is happily orbiting around the Moon, photographing the place in high resolution. But humans sent it to the Moon, and just like all the artificial satellites sent there in the past, it’s doomed. No satellite we’ve sent to the Moon has ever orbited for longer than a few years before crashing down into the lunar surface. In theory, you could probably get a satellite to last a few hundred years around the Moon.

But why? How come we can’t make moons for our moon to have a moon of it’s own for all time? It all comes down to gravity and tidal forces. Every object in the Universe is surrounded by an invisible sphere of gravity. Anything within this volume, which astronomers call the “Hill Sphere”, will tend to orbit the object.

So, if you had the Moon out in the middle of space, without any interactions, it could easily have multiple moons orbiting around it. But you get problems when you have these overlapping spheres of influence. The strength of gravity from the Earth tangles with the force of gravity from the Moon.

How many moons are there in the Solar System? Image credit: NASA

Although a spacecraft can orbit the Moon for a while, it’s just not stable. The tidal forces will cause the spacecraft’s orbit to decay until it crashes. But further out in the Solar System, there are tiny asteroids with even tinier moons. This is possible because they’re so far away from the Sun. Bring these asteroids closer to the Sun, and someone’s losing a moon.

The object with the largest Hill Sphere in the Solar System is Neptune. Because it’s so far away from the Sun, and it’s so massive, it can truly influence its environment. You could imagine a massive moon distantly orbiting Neptune, and around that moon, there could be a moon of its own. But this doesn’t appear to be the case.

NASA is considering a mission to capture an asteroid and put it into orbit around the Moon. This would be safer than having it orbit the Earth, but still keep it close enough to extract resources. But without any kind of orbital boost, those tidal forces will eventually crash it onto the Moon. So no, in our Solar System, we don’t know of any moons with moons of their own. In fact, we don’t even have a name for them. What would you suggest?

February 20, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Could Jupiter Become A Star?

NASA’s Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, and proceeded to study the giant planet for almost 8 years. It sent back a tremendous amount of scientific information that revolutionized our understanding of the Jovian system. By the end of its mission, Galileo was worn down. Instruments were failing and scientists were worried they wouldn’t be able to communicate with the spacecraft in the future. If they lost contact, Galileo would continue to orbit the Jupiter and potentially crash into one of its icy moons.

Galileo would certainly have Earth bacteria on board, which might contaminate the pristine environments of the Jovian moons, and so NASA decided it would be best to crash Galileo into Jupiter, removing the risk entirely. Although everyone in the scientific community were certain this was the safe and wise thing to do, there were a small group of people concerned that crashing Galileo into Jupiter, with its Plutonium thermal reactor, might cause a cascade reaction that would ignite Jupiter into a second star in the Solar System.

Hydrogen bombs are ignited by detonating plutonium, and Jupiter’s got a lot of hydrogen.Since we don’t have a second star, you’ll be glad to know this didn’t happen. Could it have happened? Could it ever happen? The answer, of course, is a series of nos. No, it couldn’t have happened. There’s no way it could ever happen… or is there?

Jupiter is mostly made of hydrogen, in order to turn it into a giant fireball you’d need oxygen to burn it. Water tells us what the recipe is. There are two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen. If you can get the two elements together in those quantities, you get water.

In other words, if you could surround Jupiter with half again more Jupiter’s worth of oxygen, you’d get a Jupiter plus a half sized fireball. It would turn into water and release energy. But that much oxygen isn’t handy, and even though it’s a giant ball of fire, that’s still not a star anyway. In fact, stars aren’t “burning” at all, at least, not in the combustion sense.

Jupiter as imaged by Michael Phillips on July 25th, 2009... note the impact scar discovered by Anthony Wesley to the lower left. — Jupiter as imaged by Michael Phillips on July 25th, 2009.

Our Sun produces its energy through fusion. The vast gravity compresses hydrogen down to the point that high pressure and temperatures cram hydrogen atoms into helium. This is a fusion reaction. It generates excess energy, and so the Sun is bright. And the only way you can get a reaction like this is when you bring together a massive amount of hydrogen. In fact… you’d need a star’s worth of hydrogen. Jupiter is a thousand times less massive than the Sun. One thousand times less massive. In other words, if you crashed 1000 Jupiters together, then we’d have a second actual Sun in our Solar System.

But the Sun isn’t the smallest possible star you can have. In fact, if you have about 7.5% the mass of the Sun’s worth of hydrogen collected together, you’ll get a red dwarf star. So the smallest red dwarf star is still about 80 times the mass of Jupiter. You know the drill, find 79 more Jupiters, crash them into Jupiter, and we’d have a second star in the Solar System.

There’s another object that’s less massive than a red dwarf, but it’s still sort of star like: a brown dwarf. This is an object which isn’t massive enough to ignite in true fusion, but it’s still massive enough that deuterium, a variant of hydrogen, will fuse. You can get a brown dwarf with only 13 times the mass of Jupiter. Now that’s not so hard, right? Find 13 more Jupiters, crash them into the planet?

As was demonstrated with Galileo, igniting Jupiter or its hydrogen is not a simple matter.
We won’t get a second star unless there’s a series of catastrophic collisions in the Solar System.
And if that happens… we’ll have other problems on our hands.

February 19, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Why Europa?

This artist's rendering shows NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in October, 2024. It'll have to contend with Jupiter's powerful radiation. Will a newly-found low-radiation path to Europa help? Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Forget Mars, the place we really want to go looking for life is Jupiter’s moon Europa. Dr. Mike Brown, a professor of planetary science at Caltech, explains what he finds so fascinating about this icy moon, and the potential we might find life swimming in its vast oceans.
Continue reading “Why Europa?”

February 17, 2014March 8, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Where is Earth Located?

You’ve probably heard the saying “everything’s relative”. When you consider our place in the Universe, everything really is relative. I’m recording this halfway up Vancouver Island, in the Pacific Ocean, off the West Coast of Canada. And where I’m standing is about 6,370 kilometers away from the center of the Earth, that way.

From my perspective, the Sun is over there. It’s as large as a dime held at arm’s length. For me it’s really, really far away. In fact, at this exact time it’s further away than any object I you can see with the naked eye.I’m about 150 million kilometers away from the Sun, and so are you.

We’re carving out an elliptical orbit which takes one full year to complete one whole trip around. You, me and the Earth are all located inside our Solar System. Which contains the Sun, 8 planets and a vast collection of ice, rocks and dust. We’re embedded deep within our galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s a big flat disk of stars measuring up to 120,000 light years across.

Our Solar System is located in the middle of this galactic disk. And by the middle, I mean the center of the galaxy is about 27,000 light years that way, and the edge of the galaxy is about the same distance that way.

Our Milky Way is but one galaxy in a larger collection of galaxies known as the Local Group. There are 36 known objects in the local group. Which are mostly dwarf galaxies. However, there’s also the Triangulum Galaxy, the Milky Way, and the Andromeda galaxy… which is by far the largest, most massive object in the Local Group, It’s twice the size and 4 times the mass of the Milky Way.

But where is it?

From me, and you, Andromeda is located just an astronomically distant 2.5 million light years that way. Or would that be just short 2.5 million light-years that away? I’m sure you see where this is going.

The Local Group is embedded within a much larger group known as the Virgo Supercluster, containing at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters. The rough center of the supercluster is in the constellation Virgo. Which as of right now, is that way, about 65 million light years away. Which certainly makes the 2.5 million light years to Andromeda seem like an afternoon jaunt in the family car.

Unsurprisingly, The Virgo Supercluster is a part of a larger structure as well. The Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex. This is a vast filament of galactic superclusters measuring about 150 million light years across AND a billion light years long. The middle is just over that way. Right over there.

Astrophoto: Andromeda Galaxy by Fabio Bortoli — Andromeda Galaxy. Credit: Fabio Bortoli

One billion light years in length? Well that makes Andromeda seem right around the corner. So where are we? Where are you, and I and the Earth located in the entire Universe? The edge of the observable Universe is about 13.8 billion light years that way. But it’s also 13.8 billion light years that way. And that way, and that way.

And cosmologists think that if you travel in any direction long enough, you’ll return to your starting point, just like how you can travel in any one direction on the surface of the Earth and return right back at your starting point. In other words, the Earth is located at the very, very center of the Universe. Which sounds truly amazing.

What a strange coincidence for you and I to be located right here. Dead center. Smack dab right in the middle of the Universe. Certainly makes us sound important doesn’t it? But considering that every other spot in the Universe is also located at the center of the universe.

You heard me right. Every single spot that you can imagine inside the Universe is also the center of the Universe. That definitely complicates things in our plans for Universal relevance. And all this sure does make Andromeda seem close by….and it’s still just right over there, at the center of the Universe. Oh, and about every spot in the universe being the center of the Universe? Well, we’ll save that one for another episode.