How Many Stars?

As one would imagine, observing a UFO is a significant emotional event and one that I personally am re-living over and over. I am a pretty practical, logical, and down-to-earth person who knows intellectually that there are billions of stars in our galaxy alone, each of which are capable of sustaining some form of life. This life may not be what we are familiar with, but regardless EACH of these billions of suns have the potential for sustaining some sort of life. The current estimate for our galaxy (called the Milky Way) is about 300 billion stars, give or take a few billion here and there.

From the sheer numbers of these stars, if say 0.0000001% (one out of 10,000,000) were capable of sustain intelligent life, that means that in the Milky Way alone, there are 30,000 stars in our "neighborhood" that could possibly sustain intelligent life, give or take a few thousand.

Our galaxy is pretty typical spiral-type galaxy meaning that there is a black hole at the center and everything slowly rotates around it like a child's pinwheel toy. Stars are grouped into arms that spiral toward the black hole in something called the central bulge meaning that at the center there are a lot of stars in more than just the galactic plane of the pinwheel. Like a basketball, these stars protrude above and below the galactic plane and the numbers of stars "per square foot" so to speak (stellar density) is much higher there than at the outer edge of the galactic plane. Below is an image from the COBE satellite of what our galaxy looks like from our vantage point.

Our star (the sun or Sol) is about 2/3 of the way out from the center in a pretty uninteresting part of our galaxy. Although there is no way for us to see a top view of this position, the picture below is of a galaxy nearby that we believe to resemble our own and from the arrow you can see roughly where on the pinwheel our sun is located.

There are so many stars, they appear to blur together like a cloud but in reality they are VERY far apart from each other. To give you an idea of how much emptiness there is between these stars, the star closest to our sun is about 4 light years (or about 24 trillion miles) away. Without getting into particle physics, molecules are believed to be made up in a similar way - that is, there is a lot of nothing in between electrons and the protons and neutrons so the really big is sort of an example of the really small.

From edge to edge the Milky Way is about 6x10¹⁷ miles (0.6 million-trillion miles) in diameter; that’s 24,000 times further than the closest star.  In other words, it is a very long way from one side of the pinwheel to the other and it takes light a long time to go from edge to edge (about 100,000 years).

So the point is this. There is a lot of distance between us and these 30,000 stars that could possibly sustain intelligent life in the Milky Way and to get from one to another employs a technology available only in the minds of dreamers. How did they do this?

I have given this some thought and it runs a little contrary to current wisdom but is based on what else: sound. The fact that there was no sound (no engine noise or sonic boom) meant that these two UFO did not disturb the atmosphere while passing through. Putting it another way, instead of slicing through the air like the wing of an airplane, these UFOs literally moved through the molecules of the atmosphere without disturbing their position or direction. In essence I believe they were able to pass through a solid wall like a ghost in a cheap Halloween movie.

How they did this is beyond my wildest imagination but I assume that somehow they manipulated the phase of their matter as compared to the phase of our matter thereby guaranteeing their molecules would pass unharmed right through ours. If you are youthful and are intrigued by this, I urge you to apply yourself and consider how something like this would be possible. Just think of what a technology like this could yield in the way of creating a speaker driver!

It will probably take a while for me to calm down and get the image of the UFOs out of my mind so please bear with me while I run off on a tangent to the high end for a while.

Yours for higher fidelity,
Philip Rastocny

I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

My other titles include:

• Althea: A Story of Love
• Build an Extreme Green Composter
• The Extreme Green Guide to Wind Turbines
• Build and Extreme Green Hot Water Solar Collector
• The Extreme Green Guide to Solar Electricity
• The Extreme Green Guide to Improving Mileage
• Meditation for Geeks (and other left-brained people)
• Build an Extreme Green Raised Bed Garden
• Build an Extreme Green Rain Barrel
• Build an Extreme Green Squirrel-Proof Bird Feeder
• Extreme Audio 1: House Wiring
• Extreme Audio 2: Line Filtering
• Extreme Audio 3: Chassis Leakage
• Extreme Audio 4: Interconnect Cables
• Extreme Audio 5: Speaker Wires
• Extreme Green Organic Gardening
• Extreme Green Organic Gardening 2012
• The Extreme Green Appliance Buying Guide

Copyright © 2015 by Philip Rastocny. All rights reserved.