The universe is amazing!

How would you react if I say that the Milky Way is in the process of collision with another galaxy?

As is also true and will do with the Andromeda galaxy, there was an accurate measurement of the speed at which our galaxy is moving to be attracted to Andromeda (which exceeds by mass), but recent discoveries show that this figure was wrong and that this rate was even higher, so the collision would be sooner than previously thought.

Quote:

According to more detailed measurements, scientists have discovered that our solar system, the Milky Way is moving at 600,000 kilometers per hour, 100.000 mph faster than originally thought.

Faster rotation also means that its mass should be similar to Andromeda, about 270 billion times the mass of the sun.

This means that the gravitational attraction of the Milky Way galaxy exerts on its neighbors is stronger, which means that a crash would occur sooner than expected.

The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are the two largest in our cosmic neighborhood.

Our solar system is about 28,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way, Andromeda is about two million light years away.

Incredible but true.






link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TREsI0PS45Q



The stars

They are the most important constituents of galaxies. Stars are massive shining spheres of gas due to its huge nuclear reactions. When due to the gravitational force, pressure and temperature inside a star is strong enough, it starts the nuclear fusion of atoms, and begin to emit a dark red light, which then moves to the upper state is which is our Sun, and later, by modifying the nuclear reactions inside, swell and finally cooled.





What is a white dwarf?

A white dwarf is a stellar remnant that is generated when a star of mass less than 9-10 solar masses has exhausted its nuclear fuel. In fact, it is a stage of stellar evolution that will cross the 97% of the stars we know, including the Sun white dwarfs are, along with red dwarfs, stars more abundant in the universe.




The biggest stars in the Universe found so far.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered the biggest star ever seen, which has a size 300 times larger than our sun. The existence of a star as it breaks with what was previously estimated as the limit for the mass of a star with 150 solar masses.

The team of astronomers led by professor of astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, Paul Crowther, used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) located at Paranal, Chile, to study star clusters NGC 3703 and 136th in detail RMC, located at 22,000 and 165,000 light years from Earth respectively.

It was in this second group was found R136a1 christened star of 265 solar masses and birth size up to 320 solar masses. "Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," said Crowther.

R136a1 is in the middle of his life now "and has gone through an intense weight loss program, shedding a fifth of its initial mass during that period, or more than 50 solar masses," added the professor.

It is still unclear how it is possible to form stars like this. "O born as big or more small stars were merged to produce," says Crowther.

Besides being the biggest star ever found so far, it is also the brightest. If I were in our solar system shine 10 million times the sun, and because of its reduced mass of the Earth one year to 3 weeks. We also fill it with radiation, making life impossible on earth.

"Because of the rarity of these monsters, I think it is very unlikely to break this record again soon," he said Crowther.




How many galaxies in the universe?

A galaxy is a collection of solar masses containing between 100,000 and 3.000 million billion stars.
They are grouped in sets and super sets and some come in several forms.
Nobody knows exactly how many galaxies in the universe, but ours, the Milky Way is just one of thousands, even millions.
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy spans 100,000 light years in diameter and from which we see on Earth, looks like two fried eggs together.
Spiral galaxies tend to include bright young stars, while elliptical galaxies, the most common, usually contain older stars.
Sometimes Andromeda galaxy is described as twin because it has the same age, shape and size.

It is estimated that about 100 billion galaxies in the universe






How many planets are in our galaxy?

Scientists can estimate how many planets there are scattered around our galaxy, the Milky Way, with a figure of ...
50,000 million planets!,
The question of excellence in the field of astrophysics, perhaps the oldest and still the scientists have failed to answer is: is there a living planet similar to Earth? The answer is still being sought.


500 planets with possible life

Of those 50,000 million planets, 500 are in a habitable zone of the Milky Way, characterized because it is neither too cold nor too hot, it would be a temperate region where they could will develop the conditions for that in some these 500 planets develop life (if you have not already developed ...).




Black Holes

A black hole is a finite region of space-time caused by a large concentration of mass in its interior, with huge increases in density, which generates a gravitational field such that no particle of matter, even photons of light, can escape in that region.

The origin of black holes is presented by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in his 1988 book titled in Spanish History of Time: From Big Bang to black holes which explains the process that gives rise to the formation of black holes.
This process begins after the death of a red giant (star of large mass), call it death to the total extinction of its energy. After several billion years of life, the gravitational force of the star begins to exert force on itself causing a mass concentrated in a small volume, becoming a white dwarf. At this point the process can continue until the collapse of the star by the gravitational pull car that ends up turning this into a white dwarf black hole. This process eventually assemble a force of attraction so strong that even light trapped in it.
In simpler words, a black hole is the end result of extreme gravity can be pushed to the limit. The same gravity that keeps the star stable, begins to compress to the point that the atoms begin to flatten. The electrons in orbit closer and closer to the atomic nucleus and eventually merging with protons to form more neutrons. The result, a neutron star. At this point, depending on the mass of the star, the plasma of neutrons triggers an irreversible chain reaction, the severity increases exponentially by decreasing the distance between atoms were originally. Implode neutron particles, flattening more, achieving results in a black hole, gravity in a space of infinite size immeasurably small.




Why is space black?

Why is space black?
Heaven on Earth is bright because air molecules reflect sunlight. However, in the absence of the moon atmosphere, the sky is as black ditingue, space is almost empty and there are few molecules that reflect light.

Thomas Digges, an astronomer of the sixteenth century, was asked the following question: how is it possible that all the stars in the universe together do not
produce a large luminescence and the night sky is black?. Digges did not find the answer. Wilhelm Olbers, astronomer of the nineteenth century, also raised the question without being able to answer. The answer to why the night sky is black today is known as "Olbers's paradox." Olbers suggested
throughout his life a number of solutions among which the interstellar dust was the most convincing to the scientific community.

Years later, Edward Harrison, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), says in one of his books that the theories that Digges, Olbers and others gave about an infinite universe with an infinite number of stars was misleading. Harrison says that there is no sufficient number of stars covering the sky. The night sky is lit because the stars and the universe is not infinite.




Antimatter

Antimatter is the extension of the concept of antiparticle to matter. Thus, antimatter is composed of antiparticles, while ordinary matter consists of particles. For example, an anti-electron (an electron with a positive charge, also called the positron) and an antiproton (a proton with a negative charge) could form an atom of antimatter, in the same way that an electron and a proton form a hydrogen atom. The contact between matter and antimatter would lead to the annihilation of both, resulting in high-energy photons (gamma rays) and other particle-antiparticle pairs.




There are several theories about antimatter:

The first says that matter and antimatter existed in equal parts on the origin of the universe but there was a bit more matter than antimatter. Therefore, the antimatter would have been totally destroyed by the annihilation and the present universe would consist of the surviving material residue.

Another theory says the universe exist in equal amounts of matter and antimatter, obviously, in places far away from them. However, meeting points, there would be great phenomena of annihilation. Rays called gamma rays, which are usually observed in the universe, could be side effects of these reactions.
It is very difficult to investigate through astronomical observations, since matter and antimatter and electromagnetic emissions equal.

What uses can have the antimatter?

Antimatter can have different uses:

- The first fuel.
To imagine how powerful it can be, with only 250 grams of antimatter
could reach Mars in 1 day and the moon in 8 minutes.

- The second would be to produce energy.
Antimatter is the most powerful energy source known to man. Releases a
energy of a hundred percent efficiency (nuclear fission has an efficiency of one and
half percent). Antimatter creates no pollution or radiation, and a drop could
provide electricity to all of New York for a day.

- The third use of antimatter could have, and unfortunately the most dangerous, would be the
weapons. This process of matter-antimatter annihilation could be used
the explosive more powerful than you can imagine. One gram of antimatter to unite
with one gram of matter can produce an energy release 1 million tons of
material to almost 20000 feet. Or what is the same, the power of twenty kilones,
ie, the power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
But besides all this, antimatter has many limitations:

- There is no antimatter in the known world relatively available.

- So far in the process of obtaining a unit of energy as antimatter we
100 million previously spent more energy.

- The effectiveness of current storage of antiprotons is just the order of 1%.

- If all the capacity will be used to produce antiprotons, the final results after
one year only serve to keep alive a 100-watt bulb for
3 seconds.

- If you go to use the full capacity of antimatter world the lamp producible
could be on more than 6 minutes.

- All existing global energy reserves of coal, oil and gas, once
converted into antiprotons, with current yields, produce energy
enough for a car could turn around with a trip to Spain
coast.