What Is Space?

Space is everything in the universe that lies outside the Earth's atmosphere. Looking at the night sky, space seems filled with stars.

Yet, the distances between the stars are imaginably vast, and there is almost nothing between them but clouds of stardust.

Much of space is a vast, empty void, which is how it gets its name.

 No one knows how large space is, and much of it is far away to see, but using modern technology astronomers are discovering more and more.

Twinkling Stars

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Stellar Evolution

If the Sun is essentially an electrical phenomenon, as seems to be the case, and it is also a fairly typical star, then all stars should exhibit properties that are consistent with the Electric Sun (ES) model. Do they? Let us extrapolate the ES model and compare it to what we have observed about stars. In 1911 Ejnar Hertzspung constructed a plot of the absolute brightness vs. spectral class (temperature) of the stars whose distances we could then accurately measure by the parallax method.  In 1913 Henry Norris Russell independently repeated this exercise.  This plot is therefore named the  Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram, and is one of the first topics presented in introductory astronomy courses.  It is clear that the HR diagram is a plot of actual observations – not something deduced from theory. So, any viable model of the workings of a star must be consistent with it.  Is the Electric Sun (ES) model of how a star is powered consistent with the HR diagram?  If it is not, then this would disprove the ES hypothesis.

Walking On The Moon

When astronauts landed on the Moon in 1969, they found a landscape of cliffs and plains, completely covered in many places by a fine white dust. This lunar dust was created long ago when the Moon's surface broke up under the impact of meteoroids. Because there is no air, wind, snow or rainon the Moon, the dust never moves- and so the footprints left behind by the astronauts will be there for millions of years.

White Ball Of Rock

The Moon is the biggest, brightest object in the night sky, shining almost like a night-time sun. Yet it has no light of its own. It is just a big cold ball of rock, and it shines only because it reflects the light of the sun. It is Earth's companion in space, about 384,000 km away, and circles around it once a month. As the moves around, it also rotates (turns) slowly on its axis, so that the same face always points towards us. The far side of the Moon can never be seen from the Earth's surfaces.

The Scale Of The Universe

What we can see of a space is only a tiny fraction of what is there. With powerful telescope, intensely bright clusters of stars or galaxies called quasars can be seen 13 billion light-years across.

 So if there are quasars equally far away in all directions, the universe must be at least 26 billion light-years across. The light of some stars, when see through a telescope, may be thousands or even millions of light-years away.

The Sky At Night

Stars appear in the same pattern they have done for many thousands of years - although a few stars, such as Polaris, have shifted slightly since the time of the first ancient Babylonian astronomers.

By studying the sky on a nightly basis, you can learn to identify bright stars, such as Sirius, and even some of the planets in our Solar System , such as Venus and Jupiter, and recognize some of the better known constellations.