The Cosmos

"The entire cosmos is a cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth. When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise – then we can build a noble environment. If our lives are not based on this truth, then we shall perish." - Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

The cosmos will always be a mystery to us. Each new discovery only adds to the mystery.

Here are some interesting fun facts about what is out there – courtesy of Facebook pages ‘SkyMyst’, ‘Amazing Facts’, ‘Science and Facts’, and ‘The Study Secrets’ etc… 

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Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has massive geysers of water vapor and ice particles continuously erupting from cracks in its icy south polar surface, shooting material directly out into space where it eventually forms one of Saturn's fainter rings. NASA's Cassini spacecraft flew directly through these geyser plumes multiple times and analyzed their chemical composition in detail, confirming the presence of liquid water, organic carbon compounds, and dissolved salts, essentially the same basic chemical ingredients considered necessary for life as we understand it, all originating from a vast hidden ocean of liquid water that exists beneath the moon's icy outer shell, kept liquid by internal heat from gravitational tidal flexing caused by Saturn's massive gravity.

The detected chemical signature was specific enough that some researchers have informally noted the salt and chemical balance detected resembles, in basic composition terms, the type of saline solution found in certain cocktails, leading to popular comparisons describing the ocean's chemistry in those casual terms.

Beyond the comparison itself, the genuinely serious scientific implication is that Enceladus represents one of the most promising and accessible locations in our entire solar system where actual extraterrestrial microbial life could currently exist, hidden beneath a thick shell of ice, in an ocean we have already directly sampled and chemically analyzed. – A Facbeook post my ‘SkyMyst’

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Our Sun is currently in the stable, hydrogen burning phase of its life, but this will not last forever. In approximately 5 billion years, after exhausting the hydrogen fuel in its core, the Sun will begin fusing helium instead, causing it to dramatically expand into a red giant star, swelling to a size estimated to be over 200 times its current diameter. This expansion will be large enough to completely engulf and vaporize both Mercury and Venus entirely, and current scientific models remain genuinely divided on whether Earth's orbit will expand outward fast enough to narrowly escape the same fate, or whether our home planet will also be consumed and destroyed within the Sun's outer atmosphere.

Even in the scenario where Earth's orbit technically survives, the planet's surface temperature will rise so extremely during this phase that all oceans will boil away and the atmosphere will be completely stripped, rendering it permanently uninhabitable regardless of direct engulfment. After this red giant phase, the Sun will eventually shed its outer layers entirely, leaving behind a small, dense white dwarf remnant surrounded by an expanding planetary nebula, the same end state shared by stars like the one that created the Southern Ring Nebula we have already discussed. Every single planet currently orbiting our Sun has a confirmed, calculated, scientifically certain expiration date, and so does the Sun itself. – A Facbeook post my ‘SkyMyst’

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The beautiful image of a blue sunset over Mars represents a historic milestone in space exploration, captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover inside Gale Crater.

This photograph marks the first time humans have witnessed twilight on another planet.

The difference between sunsets on Mars and Earth comes down to atmospheric physics.

On Earth, our thick atmosphere scatters blue light away during the day, letting red and orange wavelengths dominate the horizon at sunset. Mars operates in reverse. During the Martian day, the sky looks pinkish-red because of fine iron oxide dust hanging in the thin atmosphere. However, as the sun sinks low, these dust particles scatter the blue light forward, creating a soft blue glow around the solar disk. Because Mars sits much farther from the sun than Earth, the sun appears noticeably smaller.

This view was captured by Curiosity, a large rover that landed on the Red Planet over twelve years ago.

Engineered for a short mission, the machine still drives, photographs, and sends data across millions of kilometers of deep space, delivering a cosmic view that every past generation missed by just a sliver of time.

photo credits: NASA's curiosity's rover. - A Facebook post by ‘Truth Daily’

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A genuinely strange but seriously considered scientific and philosophical proposal, sometimes called cosmopsychism or panpsychism at the cosmic scale, suggests that consciousness or proto-conscious experience might not be an emergent property unique to biological brains, but instead a fundamental feature of the universe itself at every scale, with the universe's large scale structure potentially representing some form of vastly distributed information processing analogous in certain mathematical ways to conscious experience.

This concept has been explored by credentialed physicists and philosophers including figures like Roger Penrose, who has proposed that consciousness is fundamentally connected to quantum processes at the deepest levels of physical reality, and researchers who have noted the genuinely striking quantitative and structural similarities between the large scale cosmic web of galaxy filaments and the neural connection networks within a human brain, including comparable node density, clustering behavior, and information distribution patterns across both structures. While this remains firmly outside mainstream scientific consensus and faces enormous fundamental objections, it has not been formally ruled out by any known physical law, and a small number of serious researchers continue publishing peer reviewed work exploring the mathematical and philosophical implications of treating information processing and potentially proto-conscious experience as fundamental features of physical reality rather than emergent properties arising exclusively from biological complexity. – A Facebook post by ‘Sky Myst’

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Olbers' paradox, named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers who popularized it in 1823 though it was recognized even earlier, poses a deceptively simple question with a profound cosmological answer, asking why the night sky is dark if the universe is infinite in size and has existed for an infinite amount of time, since in such a universe every line of sight extended outward from Earth in any direction would eventually intersect the surface of a star, filling the entire sky with stellar brightness equal to the surface of a typical star and making the night sky as blindingly bright as the surface of the Sun uniformly in every direction.

The resolution of this paradox, which troubled astronomers for centuries, turns out to require two connected facts about our actual universe that were not known when the paradox was first formulated, namely that the universe has a finite age of approximately 13.8 billion years and has been expanding since a definite beginning event called the Big Bang. Because the universe has a finite age, light from stars more than approximately 13.8 billion light years away has not had sufficient time to reach Earth yet, meaning the observable universe contains a finite rather than infinite number of stars contributing light to our sky. The expansion of the universe further redshifts distant starlight to lower energies and longer wavelengths, reducing its contribution to visible sky brightness.

Together, these two facts, that the universe began at a specific moment and has been expanding ever since, fully resolve the paradox and mean that the darkness of the night sky above you is itself direct, everyday observational evidence that the universe has not always existed but had a definite beginning. – A Facebook post by ‘SkyMyst’

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