• Question: What do you think the biggest mystery about space is?

    Asked by imogen98 to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 13 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      My answer: “Are we alone?”

      What do you think?

    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      Yeah, I think the question of whether there is life elsewhere is a big one, maybe the biggest. Dark matter is another good mystery. I think the cool part is that we really don’t know the answers, so it’s fun trying to figure it out.
      g

    • Photo: Usman Kayani

      Usman Kayani answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      The biggest mystery for me are blackholes; probably because I’m researching them. They can be described by three properties and nothing else; its angular momentum (if its spinning), charge (if its electrically charged like positive, negative and neutral) and its mass (how much it ‘weighs’).

      So in that sense they are very simple, more simpler than the weather which has so much more than just three parameters and even with a supercomputer its not always accurate. Yet in other ways they are the most complicated objects in the universe and we are yet to find a theory that can fully explain them without having to divide by zero somewhere (thats infinite, a disaster for a physicist) and physics literally breaks down the closer you get to the centre, the singularity of the blackhole!

    • Photo: Martin Archer

      Martin Archer answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      Two other mysteries with the word “dark” are:

      Dark Energy, which we think is why the Universe’s expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down.
      And Dark Flow is what we call some galaxies near the edge of the visible Universe that seem to be going faster than they should. Basically, if we see something we can’t explain and think there must be something else there to account for it we put the word “dark” in front.

      Of course these are popular questions, but there are loads of stuff we don’t know about and that’s what scientists are there for, trying to figure out some of the answers.

    • Photo: Amy Tyndall

      Amy Tyndall answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      How we began, and how we’re going to end! We have information about what space was like seconds after the Big Bang, but we still don’t know what caused it in the first place. Similarly, we can only theorise about how the Universe is going to evolve in the years to come, but no idea what’ll eventually happen…

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