WHISPERS FROM OUR UNIVERSE

A “Reader’s Digest” Gathering of Scientific Terms
Including Images with Poetic Text
by EDWARD LONGO

OUR UNIVERSE: In spite of the knowledge provided by scientists and environmentalists regarding global warming and the catastrophic events affecting our planet it is difficult to make sense of it all. In this poetic, prose-like, informative "Reader's-Digest" manner Longo offers an artistic and colorful presentation while attempting to maintain a logical understanding of how things work in the universe. This is especially true regarding events affecting the planetary system within our mother galaxy, The Milky Way. From Earth, without telescopic aid, the band of the Milky Way appears as a bright and hazy region of light encircling the sky. Many ancient cultures seem to have imagined it as a stream of various kinds. The Egyptians saw it as a river, perhaps the celestial embodiment of the River Nile. The Greeks imagined it as a stream of milk, and from that conception comes our modern term, "Milky Way."

WHISPER: Of particular importance is one of the experiments on Cluster that is that it is used to study plasma is called WHISPER. This is the French-led instrument that measures electron density as the spinning spacecraft sweep around the planet. The faint radio signal that fills our universe is the echo of the beginning of the universe. This signal, called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, was first detected by accident in 1964 but has since been measured in detail by a number of experiments. These measurements provide a rich information set that enables us to determine how the universe began, how galaxies formed and what the eventual fate of the universe might be.

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