Space is vast and goes on forever, as far as we know. Is there life somewhere out there, or are we alone in this ever expanding void?  What could be out there? What could be coming? There is so much we don’t know. There is so much more we could know. Where do we start to learn about this place in space that we call home?

NASA gets a lot of money each year for technology and space expeditions. Space is out there and is forever changing; we need to get out there. There is a plan for 2020 to send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon to set up a long-term presence. This will later be used to help send a rover to Mars in 2020. In 2023 Americans will be going to orbit the moon to set up a “lunar orbiting platform for crews to visit from Earth,” (NASA.gov). This will be packed with supplies that will be able to aid other missions to further planets such as mars and one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, to extend our presences in deep space. This gets us out into space and discover new worlds.  On April 18th 2018 NASA launched a Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) at 6:51 EDT on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at the Space Launch Complex 40. TESS is going to be looking for new planets past our solar system. It is going to be heading into Earth’s orbit to locate planets outside our solar system that are close enough that we can use ground telescopes to study the new planets. TESS will be using transit to find theses planets. Transit is when a planet crosses in front of the star it’s orbiting. One of the telltale signs of transit “is a drop in the brightness of that star’s light,” (NASA’s instagram). There has been a satellite that had the same job before this one called Kepler. Kepler is a space telescope that has discovered almost 2700 new worlds orbiting other stars theses are known as “exoplanets.” All of these new pieces of technology are so incredibly cool and amazingly interesting. NASA has been doing so many great things that have expanded our view of space. People would have never have thought that we would have been able to go into space past the moon and especially not to see different solar systems and discover new planets.

There is so much that could be out in space. It is vast and there will always be more to search. This is why NASA is so important. It helps us see what could be out there and what could be coming. The more we learn, the bigger our universe becomes and the less tethering threats become. There will be things we will come across that we won’t be able to explore with current technology. This will just make us create different and new pieces of technology that may lead to new information. This will help us expand our knowledge of our universe. We now know what will happen to the earth and to our universe even billions of light years.Sangmo Tony Sohn of the Space Telescope Science Institute says “we at last have a clear picture of how events will unfold,” NASA has a telescope that has been watching for new planet and stars that found a galaxy coming our way. The Andromeda Galaxy is hurtling towards the Milky Way Galaxy in about 4 billion years the galaxies will collide forming a new galaxy and new stars. Even though the collision will happen billions of years in the future the technology that NASA and other organizations were able to make computer generated simulations of what the collision would look like. Andromeda is approximately 2.5 million light-years away now but is falling towards us “more than 2,000 times faster than a fastball,” NASA scientist Sangmo Tony says. The galaxies are being pulled together because of the gravity that surrounds both of the galaxies. When this happens the sun will be thrown to a new part of the galaxy. Our Earth and solar system will make it out just fine, the night sky will be full of new stars and we will be able to see the newly formed galaxy from our home.This means a new bigger and better sky at night. Unfortunately this is happening billions of years from now, so unless scientist find a way to keep people alive forever or someone finds the fountain of youth within our lifetime, all the people of Earth right now will not be around to see this amazing event. This gives even more reason to get out there. We also won’t be around to see the last black hole disappear, but when that happens no one will be.

Black holes are created when a star’s core collapse and the ratio between the radiation and gravity changes greatly. The gravity outweighs the radiation by massive amounts. The mass of most black holes cores are thousands time greater than our sun’s mass so its gravity siverly outweighs all stars and planets.NASA has been exploring this fascinating event for a long time. When a star collapses it can either tune into a neutron star or a black hole, when the star is massive enough. When you look at a black hole you are actually seeing the event horizon. If something wanted to cross the event horizon it would have to be traveling by the speed of light, and for now that’s impossible. That’s what we see but that’s not what the hole of a black hole is. As of now scientist don’t really know what a black hole is made up of yet, but they are trying their best to find out more. It may be infinitely dense, which means all of its mass is concentrated to one point in space and it would have no surface or volume, but it may be something completely different. A myth about black holes is that it suckes thing up, but thats not true. If we were to replace our sun with an equal black hole nothing much would happen we would just be really cold.This is a very interesting point because our sun being a star will one day collapse causing  a black hole to form. Science has found this, so that means that the earth and whatever is living on it at the time may be able to continue living after that happens. Black hole are also able to bend time and space making things that would be orbiting a black hole seem to bend around it instead of disappearing around it like it would with a star or a planet.

There are so many things that we have been able to figure out because of how black holes work. Physics has been greatly improved by the know that has been discovered thanks to black holes. There are some many theories that have come from black holes such as the string theories. This theory has has helped scientist try to learn more about how the universe works and when the universe could possibly end. This also helps now with what we should be doing or not doing to our planet to keep it alive and thriving for as long as possible. The things the NASA has found are absolutely boggling. NASA has been able to see meteors that have traveled close to our atmosphere. NASA has also been studying solar flares that could endanger us and trying to find ways to stop solar flares so if there was ever a flare that was going to get too close to us we would be able to stop it. NASA has been doing phenomenal things for humanity for such a long time. NASA will continue to do amazing things and help humanity along in so many ways. For all we know we may be the first species to become interstellar that is, if there is life out there and they haven’t settled on planets that aren’t their home planet.