Space Exploration: The New Level of Human Era !? (Part 1)

The space, infinite amount of stars, infinite lightyears of the void, infinite possibility. What is humanity really know about space? A lot? pretty wide? Actually, not really. Human does not really know much about space. The farthest distance human between our home, the earth, is 400.171 km away. It has been reached during Apollo 13 mission when humans visited the moon. The farthest human-made object just got out of our solar system to the interstellar space in 2012. 23 billion kilometers, The Voyager 1. But how is that distance compared to the entire space? The answer is nothing. Nobody knows exactly how big is space, but only the assumption of how big it is. It is nothing compared to that distance. The closest star to our solar system is Proxima-Centaury, 4 lightyears away. It will take almost forever for humans in this era to even reach that.

However, we can still observe the far-away space object, even from earth. In this modern era, there are many technologies that we can use to look at them. For example, The Event Horizon telescope that captured the image of a black hole. Other than that, we have got a new replacement for our old Hubble space telescope, the James-Webb space telescope. The next era of human exploration is here.

Do you know that space is expanding, even faster than the speed of light? It is expanding since the big bang up until now. That makes our universe become less and less observable because the expansion is overlapping the speed of light itself. As we all know, we need light to be able to see, right? It means that we can not even see anything from the farther universe because the speed of light is not fast enough to be able to get to us. Anything that we see there right now is just simply not far enough to be overlapped by the expansion. But soon, they also will be vanished, just like the other far-distances objects. The sky that we see right now is different than what humans in the past saw million years ago. Also right now, we see the past of that space objects, because light needs time to travel. For example, a star that is 5 million lightyears away, when we see it right now, it is actually the light that comes from 5 million years ago, because the light travels. But what about the farther away object that is already overlapped by the expansion of the universe? We never know, we can not see them from here. So, it makes us can not determine how big the universe is because we can not see “through” it. We also never know what are there, are there aliens, or other living creatures, like us?

Now, let’s talk about the black hole. We also can not see what is in them because the gravity is so strong, that not even a single light can escape. According to the theory of general relativity, the black hole phenomenon happens when the compact mass can deform spacetime. It will start pulling anything around them, even light, so that is why it is black. Are you already familiar with the theory of relativity? If not, I will explain it to you in my way. To be continued...