No Longer in the Dark

artist's drawing of matter being sucked into black hole                                      NASA/JPL-Caltech

We seem to be making some great strides in our understanding of ~ or, at least, our ability to study ~ the cosmos. Most recently, the news is that we may actually be able to "see" black holes with instruments that can sense the gravitational waves they cause. According to this article, "Detecting gravitational waves would revolutionize the field of astronomy because it would give observers an entirely new way to see the universe. Armed with this new tool, they will be able to test general relativity in ways never before made possible": http://finance.yahoo.com/news/revolutionary-discovery-could-help-scientists-204000206.html;_ylt=AwrTceB6RzhVkyEAJEMnnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTEzcTI5cjZ1BGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDWUhTMDAzXzEEc2VjA3Nj
   We now have a map of dark matter in space. While it's a highly accurate map, it covers only 0.4 percent of the cosmos. Still, it's a big deal, in that it shows where the dark matter is and isn't, which,
in turn, when studied, may help scientists understand how quickly the universe is being pulled apart by dark energy: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32284995
   So what's the difference between dark matter and dark energy? You might well ask ~ and if you did, here's the answer you would receive: http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/
   This interesting thing comes from wisegeek.com:
   Our solar system is located in the Milky Way galaxy. Our solar system contains the sun, planets, satellites and rings of planets, asteroids, comets and other dust particles. The sun contains 99.9% of the matter in the solar system, but it contains only a tiny amount of the matter in the Milky Way galaxy because the Milky Way is huge.
   If we imagine that the Milky Way is the same size as the United States, our solar system would only be the size of a quarter in comparison to it. The size of the US is more than 9 million square miles (570 billion inches). A US quarter is less than 1 inch in diameter.
   This means that we can fit about 597 billion of our solar systems into the Milky Way galaxy. It also means that our solar system makes up 1.6754386e-10% (.00000000016754386%) of the Milky Way galaxy. Since our sun contains most of the matter of our solar system, we can also say that our sun contains about 1.6754386e-10% of the matter in the Milky Way galaxy.

More about the sun:

• The sun is about 4.6 billion years old.


• The sun is huge; 1 million Earths could fit inside it.


• If we wanted to match the energy of the sun, we would need to blow up about 100 billion tons of dynamite per second.