I photographed Saturn from nearly one billion miles from our back garden (and Earth!) in the early hours of 3rd September 2023.
I used the near full zoom on my brilliant Nikon P1000 camera. Image taken unguided on a reasonably steady tripod. I used manual exposure etc. settings as easier to focus. No special astrophotography software was used. A very unseasonable warm evening with haze and air currents prevents better clarity. I was pleased with this effort with minimal accessories.
Saturn is 75 thousand miles (120,000 km) in diameter. Saturn is 9.5 times bigger than Earth & 764 Earths could fit inside Saturn. It is mainly made of hydrogen and helium gases. The centre of Saturn is a dense core of metals like iron and nickel surrounded by rocky material and other compounds solidified by intense pressure and heat. It takes 29 years to complete an orbit around the sun.
My interest in Astronomy covers all aspects of this very large topic 😉
One of the largest if not the largest question to be asked in nature is where did it all begin: space the universe, galaxies, stars, planets and us?
Here is an interesting article that to briefly explains the big question and latest theorised answer.
Big Bang theorists ask ‘what came before the Big Bang?’. The standard answer is that there was nothing at all.
Normally we are quite comfortable with the idea of ‘nothing’. We are conditioned by experience to think of nothing as being an absence of something within a given area, but if space itself was created in the Big Bang, there can’t be ‘nothing’ because there’s nowhere to put the ‘something’ that doesn’t exist. Asking what came before the Big Bang is equally meaningless because ‘time’ was created along with space – you can’t have a ‘before’ because time didn’t exist.
For a species that experiences the world by interacting with time and space, that’s a slightly uncomfortable, brain-blending concept.
Luckily (depending on your point of view) there are physicists who believe that, far from being the beginning of all things, the Big Bang was just the moment our Universe burst from the womb of a parent universe – just one offspring of a much larger multiverse.
The idea that our Universe is just one of countless others might seem (at best) incredible and (at worst) delusional, but remember this: we once thought our planet was unique; then we thought our solar system was unique and, after that, we thought our galaxy was unique – is it such a stretch to imagine that our Universe isn’t as unique as we like to believe?
One of the problems with our Universe being ‘the’ Universe is that it seems a little too perfect. It is a Universe where the laws of physics are perfectly tuned for the creation of stars, galaxies, planets and life – if just one aspect of those laws was different, then the Universe as we know it wouldn’t exist.
It is the same problem we once had with our planet. Looked at in isolation, the Earth seems to have been perfectly ‘designed’ for the creation of life – just the right distance from just the right sort of star with just the right atmosphere and just the right sort of magnetic field (and so on). Of course we now know that there are countless other planets out there where conditions aren’t perfect and where life doesn’t exist. We were just the winners in the planetary lottery.
The multiverse would solve the problem of our ‘perfect’ Universe in the same way. Just as the Earth won the planetary lottery, our Universe won the cosmological lottery. It seems ‘perfect’ because the conditions within it allowed us to evolve and marvel at its perfection. But there are countless other universes where conditions weren’t just right.
You can compare it a game of cards. If you were allowed to pull just one card from the deck, the chances of pulling out the card you were looking for is quite small, but, if you were allowed to go through the whole deck, its discovery becomes inevitable. The same applies to the multiverse, with infinite permutations of the laws of physics available, it is inevitable that one would be perfect for life.
In many ways, a multiverse is a more comfortable concept to get to grips with than a perfect universe born from the void. Of course, eventually you have to ask where the first of these ancestor universe’s came from and you are right back where you started – brain-blend.
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
– Sir Arthur Eddington
Bombardment of our planet from space in it’s eary history, could organic material have hitched a ride to a primitive Earth?
It is now certain that the universe was created around 14 billion years ago via the Big Bang, the ultimate explosion in nature which spewed out early elements such as hydrogen which is the prime element of all the stars in the universe which later became synthesised into other elements as the stars evolved billions of years later in the expanding universe.
Our own solar system and planet Earth formed around 5 billion years ago. Earth and life being nurtured relied on the necessary higher elements in chemistry’s periodic table that were forged into existence under conditions of enormous pressure and temperaturecreated by the rare (second only to the Big Bang in size and power) explosion(supernova) of a nearby massive star billions of years before the creation of our solar system.
Whether there was intelligent design behind the creation of our universe is a debate always raging between the ians, ics and ists -theologians, agnostics, atheists, scientists and physicists. What became before the Big Bang is a void in our knowledge with various learned theories vying to fill it.
Sir Fred Hoyle an eminent British scientist who worked at the frontiers of astronomy and theoretical physics published in 1983 a well-illustrated popular book for non-scientists called ‘The intelligent Universe’ in which he challenged the whole idea that life originated and evolved on Earth and replaced it by ‘intelligent cosmic control’
In relation to the heavy element carbon so important to life and created in supernovae he said in the book
“Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule?” Of course you would. . . . A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question“.
Hoyle proposed also another theory now becoming widely accepted that life on the newly forming earth was in all likely seeded by organic molecules or organisms contained in space debris such as meteorites and comets that collided with the primitive earth billions of years ago when such bombardments were common. These compounds or bacteria, helped kick start life after arriving on earth and mixing with existing organic compounds, fermenting in the primordial soup where life ultimately originated .
Panspermia theory life seeded on planets from space
This hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids comets, asteroids planetoids etc., is called Panspermia.
Panspermia proposes that life forms that can survive the effects of space. Such organisms/bacteria that can survive in the harsh conditions of space or places on earth are known as extremophiles. Extremophiles could have become trapped in debris that is ejected into space after collisions between planets that harbour life, Bacteria may travel dormant for an extended amount of time before colliding randomly with other planets or intermingling with protoplanetary disks or evolving planets If the conditions are ideal on a new planet’s surface such as having liquid water or the compounds to sustain life, the bacteria become active and the process of evolution begins. Panspermia is not meant to demonstrate how life began, just the catalyst that may cause creation.
Intelligent universe: Structure of a brain micrometre across (left) and computerised structure of the universe Billions of Light Years across (right) Note the similarities -Thought provoking!
As previously commented on here, the NASA Spacecraft Voyager 1 launched in 1977 to probe giant planets Jupiter & Saturn, journeys ever further away from its place of creation – planet Earth. Currently, as at November 2012, Voyager 1 is approx 11.5 billion miles (18.5 billion Kms) from the earth. Its twin Voyager 2 launched later in 1977 is not far behind at 9.5 billion miles(15 billion km). Both of the probes are nuclear powered and therefore need no other power such as far distant sun’s solar power as used by other satellite probes etc. The nuclear generators should last until the mid-late 2020s. Technology and computer power have evolved since the 1970s, the then cutting-edge computers onboard the Voyagers have about 68 kilobytes of memory. Today a handheld 8-gigabyte iPod Nano holds more than 100,000 times as much data, smartphones and small tablet PCs hold even more data and have far greater computing power than Voyager.
The technology was sufficient and the valiant Voyagers more than fulfilled their mission objectives to capture data and amazing photos on their grand tour of the majestic planets orbiting the outer reaches of our solar system. The probes have been trailblazers, leading the way for more advanced craft to follow and it is hoped eventually human beings.
Sensors aboard Voyager that sniff out cosmic particles are returning intriguing measurements showing the spacecraft is on the cusp of leaving the solar system.
The Voyagers speed of travel is approx 35,000 mph/h (57,600 km/h) 10 miles per second. The Voyagers now weak signal traveling at light speed at 186,00 miles per second (300, ooo0 km per second) takes about 17 hours to reach earth.
Scientists may be seeing the first signs that Voyager 1 is nearing – or may have already crossed – the heliopause, the mysterious boundary between the sun’s sphere of influence and the interstellar void beyond and so begin its journey into the unknown depths of space between the stars.
The sun’s million-mile-per-hour solar wind blows a teardrop-shaped bubble around the solar system, pushing against a stream of galactic particles coming from ancient stellar explosions.
The heliosphere is compressed by the galactic wind in one direction, while it stretches behind the solar system like a comet’s tail.
The heliosphere blocks most dangerous interstellar cosmic radiation from reaching Earth.
Voyager 1 managed some photos of the planets before the cameras were turned off to save precious power. Its sensors now collect and send digital data.
Voyager 2 now doing the same.
In the distant future, should our celestial sojourners happen to encounter other civilisations from other solar systems, onboard each Voyager spacecraft is a golden record, a collection of sights, sounds, and greetings from Earth? There are 117 images and greetings in 54 languages, with a variety of natural and human-made sounds like storms, volcanoes, rocket launches, airplanes, and animals. With the vastness of space, such an encounter would be extremely remote. If not damaged or eroded by interstellar radiation dust and debris, the probes and the golden records could become time capsules lasting many thousands if not millions of years!
Once the Voyagers finally leave interplanetary space to enter into the interstellar domain of the galaxy, it would take the probes approx 50, 000 years to reach the nearest stars to our sun.
One of Voyager I’s last photos taaht of Earth the fragile little blue dot holding us humans -photographed by Voyager 1, nearly 4 billion miles (7 billion kms) from earth
Artististic rendition of the Voyager probes crossing the boundary of the solar system into interstellar space. The sun is at the centre of the blue sphere
Artististic rendition of the Voyager probes crossing the boundary of the solar system into interstellar space. The sun is at the centre of the blue sphere