Curious children are a series of children of all ages. If you have a question you would like to answer the expert, send it to [email protected].
What is outside space? – Siah, 11 years, fronte, California
Just above you is the sky – or as scientists call it, the atmosphere. It extends about 20 miles (32 kilometers) above the ground. The floating around the atmosphere is a mixture of molecules – tiny pieces of air, so small that you breathe billions every time.
There is space above the atmosphere. This is called because it contains much fewer molecules, with a lot of empty space between them.
Have you ever wondered how to travel to space and then go further? What do you find? Scientists like me are able to explain a lot of what you would see. However, there are some things we don’t know yet, for example, whether space continues forever.
Planets, stars and galaxies
At the beginning of the trip, you can recognize some glances through space. The Earth is part of a group of planets that also blended with the sun – with some asteroids and comts flying.
You may know that the sun is actually just an average star and looks bigger and brighter than other stars just because it is closer. To get to another nearest star, you should travel through trillion miles of space. If you could ride the fastest space probe ever made by NASA, you would still take thousands of years.
If the stars are like a home, then galaxies are like cities full of homes. According to scientists, the Earth’s Galaxy has 100 billion stars. If you could get forward, outside the Galaxy of the Earth, those 100 billion stars would mix – the way you look at the lights of the city buildings when viewed from the plane.
Recently, astronomers have learned that many or even most stars have their own orbit planets. Some are even similar to the Earth, so they may have other beings, and it is also wondering what they are there.
You should travel over millions of trillion miles to reach another galaxy. Most of this space is almost completely empty, only a few homeless molecules and small mysterious invisible particles, scientists call “dark substance”.
With large telescopes, astronomers see millions of galaxies – and they just go in all directions.
If you could watch long enough, over millions of years, it would seem that a new space is slowly added among all galaxies. You can visualize this by imagining small dots on a defined balloon and then thinking about the blowing. The points would continue to move further, as with the galaxies.
Is there the end?
If you could continue to leave as much as you wanted, will you forever miss the galaxy forever? Is there an infinite number of galaxies in all directions? Or maybe it all finally ends? And if it ends, what does it end?
These are questions that scientists do not yet have clear answers. Many believe that you are likely to just miss galaxies in all directions forever. In this case, the universe would be infinite, without end.
Some scientists believe it is possible that the universe can eventually live – so if you could just leave, ever come back where you started, from the other direction.
One way to think about it is to depict the globe and imagine that you are a creature that can only move on the surface. If you started to go in any direction, for example, to the east and just go further, you will eventually come back where you started. If this were the case in the universe, it would mean that it was not extremely big – though it would still be bigger than you can imagine.
In any case, you could never get to the end of the universe or space. Scientists now believe that the universe has an end – a region where galaxies stop or where there is a certain type of obstacle to the end of space.
But no one really knows it. How to answer this question will have to find out a future scientist.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you would like to answer the expert? Ask the adult to send your question to [email protected]. Please tell us your name, the age and the city you live in.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what is also interesting to you. We will not be able to answer every question, but we will do everything.
This article has been updated to correct distances to the nearest star and galaxy.
This article has been published from a conversation, non -profit, independent news organizations that provide you with facts and reliable analysis to help you give meaning to our complex world. This was written: Jack Singal, Richmond University
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Jack Singal is not working, consulting, having any company or organization, or receiving funds for which this article would benefit, and has not disclosed any related relationships for their academic appointment.