Is it possible is it real? I feel like I'm dreaming. Am I really here in the galaxy taking a tour of the Milky Way, being hosted by the stars.  In a magnificent moment of miraculous mystery,the Hubble Institute made a special spacecraft for me!  I had dreamed so long of this journey which had now come to pass. It was my privilege, because I had found a way to communicate with the stars through thought transferrence.

Libra was the first star to greet me and brought me into the star field. I was in awe at the warm welcome I received, and the communication through ESP became natural and easy, very quickly.I joined in a meeting with several of the stars that would be directing my craft as well as answering my questions. My mission was to gather information that would help give our scientists better knowledge, which in turn would hopefully bring us closer to building a space craft that could visit outside our own galaxy!

I learned from Saggitarius the reason we can't get out of our galaxy to visit the others further away,  because it is so huge that the fastest space ships we could build at the moment could not get out of it in a reasonable time. Hopefully  at some point  in the future we may develop technologies so that we can leave our own galaxy, which is why I'm here. It was Hubble that discovered Andromeda was another  galaxy not just a star. He  also learned that when a star pulsates, that is how they can measure the age etc.

Through our advanced  telescopes we know that other galaxies exist. It was very hard to discover how far away they were and took the best minds in Astronomy many years to settle the issue. There was a famous debate in the 1920s over the nature of the "spiral nebula" (the early name for galaxies). An astronomer called Shapely took the position that they were in our galaxy, while another astronomer called Curtis argued that they were outside it. Curtis won in the end and the vast size of the universe only came to light after that!

American astronomer Edwin Hubble played a major role in this profound discovery, coining the "Hubble constant". This single number describes the rate of the cosmic expansion, relating the apparent recession velocities of external galaxies to their distance. Two groups of astronomers trying to measure this fundamental constant using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) are continuing to report conflicting results. One group, led by astronomer Allan Sandage, measures distances to galaxies using pulsating Cepheid variable stars and supernovae observed in galaxies like the Virgo Cluster spiral galaxy, NGC4639, (shown in photo above). This galaxy is the most distant one to which Cepheid-based determinations have been made and was also the site of a well-studied 1990 supernova.

Other stars, Gemini,Scorpius,Pisces,and Capricorn,told me about the black holes: In Large black holes you can get close and not fall in, but in the small black holes you can  easily be pulled in, torn apart,and become space flotsam very quickly. They say there is organic matter in many places in space, especially around the planet Jupiter and others. Although, the stars would not tell me for sure if there was  life on other planets. They said it was not their place to divulge such information. I asked it it were true what Astronmers said, that the stars are about 15 billion years old. They laughed and said that too, is not for them to say.

Of course they also refused to speak of the two prominent theories that the scientists and others on earth, believe. One theory is that the destiny of the Universe which began from nothing returns to nothing. The other theory is that we are in expansion and all will eventually go back to before the big bang and start all over again, ever expanding, ever repeating. They also refused to answer if the opinion that the Universe is approximately 100 trillion years old, is true .

When it was time for me to leave they gave me a wonderful send-off with music and the Stars version of fireworks, which believe me, makes earthly fireworks look like childs play! My tears lasted the whole trip back, but through misty eyes I could still give heartfelt thanks to a patient Creator, for this spectacular Universe we call home.

Eileen T. Waldron 2003
Whimsy Challenge

For those who like to stay up to date;-)

Sep 10, 2003 - NASA announced today that it has selected a beryllium-based mirror technology for the 6.5 mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope - the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The primary mirror will actually be made up of 18 hexagonal-shaped segments, giving it 2.5 times more surface area than Hubble's mirror; but it will be one-third the weight. Construction of the mirror will begin next year, and the telescope is expected to launch some time after 2011.

Sep 10, 2003 - Astronomers have long-held that collisions were the primary cause of spinning asteroids, but new research indicates that it might be something much more gentle: sunlight. In a recent study carried out by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University (Prague), astronomers calculated the effect of millions and even billions of years of sunlight pressure can cause an asteroid to spin so fast it can fly apart; others can be made to stop spinning completely.

Black Hole
Sep 10, 2003 - The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has "heard" a black hole for the first time. The object is a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy in the Perseus cluster, located 250 million light-years away. Chandra detected deep sound waves eminating from the black hole in the surrounding gas and dust which have traveled hundreds of thousands of light-years. This discovery may help astronomers understand why there is so much hot gas in galaxy clusters when all calculations predict it should cool away - the sound energy is warming it up.

ps I wonder if that hot gas is any relation to Natural Gas who writes poetry on AD;-)

~etw~2003~