Ok, I have a big question that is bugging me about space and our planets.?

Question

Okay well you know how our solar system is in space. Well what if you go south of it, or to the side of it, what would be there? never ending space? new worlds? cultures? i have no idea what it could possibly be. Just think, there could be millions of worlds and creatures out there. What do u think?

Answer 1

The Sun and our solar system is part of a galaxy called the Milky Way, which is a giant pinwheel of about 200 billion stars. Our Sun is about 2/3 of the way from the center to the edge of the pinwheel. If you go for 1000 light years in any direction, you would still not leave the Milky Way galaxy, because it's 100,000 light-years in diameter, and over 3000 light-years thick, even in our neighborhood. There are stars all through the Milky Way, and many of them have planets.

But if you could go far enough, you could leave the Milky Way galaxy and enter "intergalactic space" where there are no stars at all, for many millions of light years. The Milkly Way has about a dozen "dwarf" galaxies orbiting around it, but the next nearest big galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is over two million light years away. Like the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy also has maybe 200 billion stars, too.

And if you go even farther, there are probably hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe ... so there's a lot of stuff out there, but most of it is a very, very long way away.

Answer 2

Well, there's really no direction in space, so saying things like "south" doesn't make any sense. Our solar system is in the Milky Way Galaxy, so there are other stars out there, possibly with their own planets and moons. Outside of our galaxy, there are other galaxies, which can have as many as 10 million to 1 trillion stars in them. I'm not sure if there is anything in between galaxies. There may be stray planets or small clusters of things, so its not empty, but most matter is within the various galaxies.

The possibility of life on other planets is pretty high, given the sheer amount of them. But keep in mind that life as we know it on Earth owes everything to the type of star we have, a yellow dwarf, our distance from it, and other such circumstances. So while there may be life elsewhere, there's no reason to believe it even resembles most of what is on Earth. It could look like our bacteria, or be more evolved, but it probably wouldn't look like humans.

Answer 3

Infinity is kind of a tough concept to grasp... I guess.

I mean, just about everything we encounter has boundaries. We can't see the other side of the ocean, but we know that out there somewhere is another continent.

But the universe is different. The universe... that is the space that contains the stuff we see, like stars and galaxies and planets... has no bounds. It is infinite. There is no "other side" or "outside." There are various theories concerning the nature of that infinity, but those are best left to scientists.

Look at a circle. Start walking around it. Do you ever come to the end? You may wind up back where you started... but there is no "end" beyond which you can't go. You can keep walking around that circle forever without coming to an end. That's one kind of infinity.

Ok, now consider a sphere... like the earth. You can start walking around the earth, and if you select the right path, you never come to the end, nor do you even get back to where you started... that's another kind of infinity. A sphere can be thought of as infinite circles.

Whether there are other universes depends on the structure of the infinity of our universe. But, in our dimension, we're the only one. And we're the only one because infinity precludes the existence of anything else.

Answer 4

there was actually a formula done called the drake equation that statisically guesses how many intelegent species there are in the universe. this site talks all about it http://www.lifeinuniverse.org/noflash/Drakeequation-07-02.html We've also found many planets very far off that might have plant life (not nessesarily green plants thought b/c plants would be more seffeicent with photosynthesis if they were black as obsidian). im willing to be the universe doesn't end (but then id be getting into string theory) at some point. Infinity is hard for humans to grasp, but at this point we have no proof otherwise. the universe expands in all drections there are as many things below the soalr system plain as there are to the side and w're still finding more.

Answer 5

Space Is Finite, But Very Big and Yes Other Worlds And Cultures Exist

Answer 6

Several hundred light years outside of our solar system is one of the arms of the Milky Way. Our closest galaxy is Andromeda. Our closest star is Centari Proximi. As far as other life, it would be arrogant to claim there is none elsewhere. Certain conditions for human sustainability are required, such as water, heat, food, etc. Will someone be traveling outside of the solar system in the next decade? Not likely. Next century?

Yes, the vastness of space is mind blowing. No one can describe the gifts God has in store for those that love Him.

Answer 7

Its very possible to have new worlds and cultures. There is plenty of room for them. There is a lot of real estate out there. If it happen here and we exist then why should we not believe that there could be another planet similar to earth. If it happens once it could happen again. And if it did then then the inhabitants could be primitive or more advanced. Or they could be just like uncle Earl. LOL

Answer 8

new stars and solar systems. 200 billion in our own galaxy.

new galaxies, about 150 billion of them, each with billions of stars and solar systems.

and yes, the chance of life outside of earth is almost 100% the universe is billions of light years across, and very already found a planet that could have water and life thats only 20 light years away. think of how many life forms could be in the universe.

Answer 9

What is around the solar system is very well known and photographed. Go here and browse the thousands of great pictures the Hubble Space Telescope has taken.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/

Answer 10

yes, there is an awful lot of space out there.

the speed of light is very fast, and provides a natural way of understanding the scale of space. light can travel all of the way around the earth, and arrive back where it started, in a little over one tenth of a second. this might happen in a fiber optic cable for telephones for example.

now it takes light a bit over one second to reach the moon - so even the moon is quite a long way away on the scale of things on earth. light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach us. take a moment to think about that, the sun is really quite far away. the solar system is quite a bit bigger than that though - it can take several hours to communicate with robotic spacecraft in the outer solar system by radio (which is a form of light, and travels at the same speed).

now consider the nearest star (next to the sun)... light takes a bit over four years to reach us from even the nearest star! that's about 260,000 times the distance between the sun and the earth. between the stars though is mostly just empty space with some gas and dust.

stars appear in clusters called galaxies. our galaxy is called the milky way, and for light to travel from end to end would take about 100,000 years. if you remember that the nearest stars are about 4 years away at the speed of light, you can see that there are a huge number of stars in just our own galaxy - about 100,000,000,000 (100 billion, or 10^11). astronomers have not been able to catalogue them all yet - in fact, catalogues only have a few million stars - because at large distances they all sort of blur together, but the number is a good estimate.

planets are a lot trickier to find than stars - because the stars are so far away and planets are very faint in comparison, most planets will be drowned out by the light from their stars and we can't see them. but astronomers have other ways of detecting them, for example when a planet passes between its star and earth, the star dims slightly. by various means, astronomers have found about 250 planets, almost all of which are orbiting nearby stars (where they can be seen more easily). statistically, it would be expected that there are billions of planets in the galaxy, just as there are billions of stars.

as if that wasn't enough, our galaxy is not the only one, not by a long shot. there are about as many other galaxies as there are stars in our galaxy (100 billion, 10^11, so in total there are about 10^22 stars in the visible universe). but the universe is not exactly infinite - although it may be infinite in space, it came into its present form about 14 billion years ago (the big bang). so we can only see a finite number of galaxies. to put it another way, the universe has a horizon, somewhat like the earth does - from our vantage point we can't see the whole universe, but we suspect there is more universe out there 'over the horizon'. if you laid our galaxy end to end, you would need 140,000 of them to reach the cosmic horizon (neglecting the expansion of space).

so in summary although we know roughly how big the universe is and something about the bright obejcts in it (stars and galaxies) we know next to nothing about the contents of the universe on the scale of planets and people. millions of worlds is actually way underestimating it!