“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
It’s been over seven months since I started writing in Space is the Place, but it feels like only yesterday that I dedicated my blog to “talking about how space is a super cool place.” Over the past two semesters I’ve written over 9,000 words on the topic of space, covering topics that range from dark matter to Bruce Willis blowing up asteroids. I’d like to use this final post to reflect on some of my favorite posts from earlier in the year. This will also serve as an opportunity to see how far I’ve come personally during my freshman year at Penn State.
Europa and the Final Frontier: My first ever post in Space is the Place, it took me nearly three hours to write Europa and the Final Frontier. Thankfully my blogging skills improved quickly. However it was exciting to begin the journey, and even more exciting to learn that other forms of life may be hidden within our own solar system.
Holes in Reality: Black holes are possibly the most bizarre inhabitants of the cosmos and continue to capture our imagination (Interstellar is well worth the watch). They’re responsible for some really weird physics, such as the distortion of time.
Message in a Bottle: The Voyager Golden Record, an audio recording meant to describe life on Earth to any alien that might stumble across it, is currently hurtling through the void of space at mind-boggling speeds. On the gold-plated record are the sounds of children laughing, greetings in 55 languages, and the haunting melody of the whale song.
We are the 5%: Everything we can observe, from a bicycle to a neutron star, only makes up 5% of the universe’s mass. What makes up the rest? The mysterious dark matter and dark energy, invisible entities that are responsible for the universe as we know it.
Eclipse Exhaustion: Back in October I somehow dragged myself out of bed at 6 a.m. to witness a rare “blood moon” lunar eclipse. Looking back, witnessing such an uncommon celestial event was well worth the cold, although at the time you would’ve been hard-pressed to convince me.
Eye in the Sky: The Hubble Telescope is truly one of mankind’s greatest technical achievements. The images it has given us depict the birth of stars within ancient cosmic nurseries, and include the famous “Pillars of Creation” and the mind-blowing Hubble Deep Field.
I hope that Space is the Place has been half as enjoyable to read as it has been to write. Every week I was given the perfect excuse to take an hour or two to learn about just how amazing our universe is. And as Douglas Adams reminds us, it’s also pretty big.
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the pharmacist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”