Tuesday, May 5, 2015

25 years and nothing – Vanguardia.com.mx

Edwin Hubble had a dream: to be an astronomer. His father for his part, thought it was a ridiculous idea and persuaded him to be inscribed in law school at the University of Oxford. On the death of his father, Hubble moved to the University of Chicago where he studied astronomy, leading to a doctorate in this field.

Hubble climbed on the shoulders of giants like Ptolemy, Thales, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, and made for one purpose: Getting to see further and confirm that ever were, are we not, nor will be the center of the universe. Galileo had already taken us from that mistake, but it was Hubble who showed us an infinite cosmos and who made a dramatic discovery: There are galaxies outside our own Milky Way. Modern astronomy says there are more than 100 billion of them and in 1925, Hubble confirmed that Andromeda is the nearest to us; only 2.5 million light years from our planet. To give an idea of ​​these distances, the human object furthest along, the special probe Voyager I, left Earth in 1977 and has toured in 38 years, a distance of about 18 thousand 200 million kilometers and continue away at a rate of 525 million kilometers a year, this equates to a speed of 17 km per second; . but in all that time, the probe Voyager I barely managed to leave our solar system

It is also Edwin Hubble whom the most important of the last century astronomical discovery is attributed: confirmation that the universe is constantly expanding. This caused a change in the way we observe and led scientists to calculate that about 13 thousand 800 million years ago, the Big Bang gave birth to everything. Albert Einstein himself called the discovery of Hubble as his “biggest mistake” because at first believed that the universe was static, which led him to modify his General Theory of Relativity.

some days ago They held the first 25 years of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, named after the great astronomer. Flying about 547 kilometers above Earth, the telescope orbits us every 97 minutes, and in the quarter century that has been in operation has impressive statistics. The 3000 Hubble has traveled 400 million miles, orbiting the Earth about 137 thousand times and making more than 1.2 million observations of more than 38 thousand celestial objects; photographing some of the most distant and oldest galaxies ever seen by mankind.

These early galaxies, some with more than 13 billion years old. The Hubble proved the existence of supermassive black holes and found, which are located in the center of most galaxies. The telescope helped establish the age of the universe by measuring its current rate of expansion; and it is thanks to him, astronomers now know that cosmic expansion is accelerating because of the mysterious dark energy.

From the information obtained from the Hubble, astronomers have been able to publish 12 thousand 800 scientific articles and some of the research on supernovae, or exploding stars and the very expansion of the universe tested by the telescope, contributed to obtaining multiple Nobel Prizes in Physics.

But there is a fact little publicized their contributions : In 25 years of continuous astronomical research we have not found any kind of life outside this planet. Hundreds of thousands of observations and photographs of hundreds of galaxies and billions of planets exist and has not found anything, not even an echo, not a picture or suspicious figure.

No test it has found that life exists or existed somewhere outside of this planet. Not a sighting that somewhere in the universe and life evolved there are advanced civilizations; anywhere. Silence and darkness have been it. We are alone in the vastness of the cosmos and, based on scientific evidence, if we have not seen or found anything is for a very simple reason. There is nothing or no one to find

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