Come and Join Me on a Fictional Space Journey

By the time we arrive at our final destination, you should have gained a far better understanding of how vast and ancient the universe is and how it has evolved over 13.8 billion years.

British spelling.

Part 1 of 16.

The information throughout the story will be, to the best of my knowledge, factual.

Between the different waypoints, there will be information on many celestial objects that are part of that mind-boggling area we call space.

Part 1 will take about 6 minutes to read; you can navigate to the next part at the end of each story.

If your knowledge of astronomy and life is above average, then this story might not be for you. For everyone else, it should give you a quick insight into how the universe has evolved from its birth to the present day.

At certain time periods, we will look back to the Earth and the Sun and try to imagine what could be happening back home.

Some of this information will be what scientists are predicting will happen, and some will be speculative, but one thing is for sure: many important changes will take place in the passing of millions or billions of years into the future of the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe.

Anything that has mass could never reach the speed of light; the vast amount of energy needed would be impossible to achieve, and a human lifespan would restrict anyone from going on a long journey through space.

Therefore, our epic journey to the far reaches of the universe can only be carried out in our imagination.

Even our next-door neighbour Mars has not been visited yet by man or woman, which shows you how difficult it will be for humans to travel for months or years to these faraway places in space.

I doubt very much if the human race will ever be able to leave our local area in space.

For us to travel to the farthest reaches of the observable universe, our fictional spacecraft, Celer, will need to accelerate to the speed of light, which is the maximum speed possible in the universe.

That speed is almost 300 thousand kilometres per second, 18 million kilometres per minute, and a staggering 1,080 million kilometres per hour, but even at that speed, it is going to take a very long time to get back to where the universe started.

At the beginning of our journey, kilometres will be used as a measure of distance, but as we travel farther out into space, they will have little meaning.

If you need to use any of the information in the story, then please check it out with scientific sources. You might find that some scientists and scientific communities have different ideas and opinions about the universe, regarding how it works and what it contains.

In the early twentieth century, most people believed that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire universe, but that was about to change. In 1924, Edwin Hubble started his detective work using the reflecting telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, USA.

Over the years, it became clear from his observations that other galaxies existed far beyond the Milky Way. By studying their light, he noticed that the spectral lines were red-shifted, meaning that most of the galaxies were speeding away from us and each other. This meant that the galaxies must have been closer together in the past, and in the very distant past, everything must have been in the same place.

This was more evidence for the Big Bang or the creation of the universe, starting from one very small spot. For a human being, one minute seems like a very short period, but that first minute after the Big Bang was a very important stage in the evolution of the universe.

It is just as well that gravity was also created; without it, there would be no structure in the universe, and we would not exist.

To find out more information about stars and other objects in space, astronomers study their light.

They can measure the properties of light, such as its intensity, wavelength, brightness, and polarization. Light speed can be very important in determining the distances of faraway objects.

I will go into more detail about light later.

The Solar System

As a young child, I remember looking up at the night sky and wondering what the twinkling lights were. They were described to me by my father as “stars.” Lying in bed that night, I tried to imagine where space ended. It is now 65 years later, and I am still asking that same question!

For some people, that tiny piece of information about the stars is sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, but not for me; I needed to know more.

As it turns out, apart from the 5 planets known as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn that can sometimes be seen with the naked eye, each one of the individual dots of light that we see in the night sky is emanating from a super-heated gas ball; some are similar to our star, the Sun, but others will be smaller, and some of them unbelievably larger.

The planets don’t twinkle like the stars; being a lot closer to the Earth means that their light is not affected so much by the Earth’s atmosphere. I am much older now but still trying to understand it all, or at least some of it: how big is the universe, what is the reason for its existence, and the biggest question for me, as I said, where does it end?

Just a few hundred years ago, most people believed that everything in space that could be seen with the naked eye revolved around the Earth. You would have been a very brave man or woman to think otherwise and say it out loud.

Following the invention of the first telescopes in the early 1600s, people gained a far better understanding of how the visible objects in the sky behaved and realised that the Earth was not the centre of the universe but just a very small, insignificant part of it.

But having said that, if it were ever established that our planet was the only place in the entire universe to support intelligent life, then surely our world would be a very special and important place indeed.

The Solar System is estimated to be over 4.5 billion years old, and at its centre is an average G-type main-sequence star or yellow dwarf star that we call the Sun. Like other G-type stars, it is visibly white but appears yellow when viewed through the Earth’s atmosphere.

If you were looking at the sun from space, then you would see it as white, its actual colour.

Part 2

In part 2, I will mention the closest planets to the Sun, Mercury and Venus before we depart from our world and make our way to Mars.