Yaireliz Dávila Figueroa: The Universe -- An Unexplored Bounty

One of my first memories is of me standing outside my house at night during the winter months and looking up at the sky. While there were many beautiful stars, I would focus on three of them in particular. These three stars would align together perfectly, but only during winter. My mom would watch them with me, and she would tell me those stars were the three wise men mentioned in the bible. She would say they were watching over us, making sure we were safe. Those three little stars were the things that first sparked my curiosity about outer space and the universe. As I grew older and found more information, I came to realize how truly amazing the universe is, how little we know about it, and how much there is still left to explore.  

There are, for example, parts of our universe that remain mostly unknown to us. This happens because those parts are simply too far away – billions of light years away, in fact – so the light emitted there will never reach us. That means that no matter how advanced the telescope we use, we will never be able to see the entire universe. We can, however predict some of what lies outside the boundaries of our observable universe by analyzing the way objects inside those boundaries react to and are affected by the outside bodies. Using this technique scientists have theorized that there may even exist another undiscovered planet in our solar system, one that lies beyond Neptune and could possibly be more massive than Jupiter. This existence of this planet – which has been named Tyche – was proposed as a possible as a possible explanation to some inconsistencies observed in the orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a conglomeration of smaller icy bodies that orbits the sun. 

More recently, astrophysicists have found evidence that there may exist a massive body on the border of our universe. They observed that large groups of galaxies, also known as galaxy clusters, were moving through space at incredibly high speeds. While it is true that the universe is constantly expanding and, therefore, all the objects in it should be moving as well, these galaxy clusters were not following the flow of the expansion of the universe and were moving in a very specific direction. For now, scientists have given these moving clusters a name: dark flow. By the incredible speed at which this ‘dark flow’ is hurtling through space, it can be deduced that the object causing the movement is massive. So massive, in fact, that it could possibly be bigger than anything we have ever seen before. Some speculate that it could even be another entirely different universe. 

There are many more interesting theories out there about how our universe works and what may or may not lie beyond what we can see of it. Most of them will need to wait decades or centuries before they can be either validated or falsified because we do not yet possess the technology to test them out. Even so, it is unfortunate that more persons are not aware of these incredible theories and discoveries. I believe physics courses all over the world should make them part of the curriculum so that the students can see and better understand how the formulas they study in the classroom are applied in real life. Furthermore, including them in physics courses could potentially make more students interested in physics, and an interested student is a student who learns more and learns faster.