There’s so much space in between the planets and stars that it used to be called ’empty space.’ It’s no longer correct to refer to ’empty space’ because they’ve discovered it’s not empty. According to Google, space contains matter, energy and fields.
Google:
Contents of space
Matter: Space isn’t truly empty because it is filled with scattered particles like hydrogen and helium atoms, and cosmic dust, known as the interstellar medium.
Energy and radiation: Space contains various forms of radiation, including visible light, X-rays, and gamma rays. There is also the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is a remnant of the Big Bang.
Fields: Fields, such as magnetic fields, exist throughout space, generated by celestial bodies like stars and planets.
Quantum activity: Even in the “vacuum” of space, quantum mechanics says that particle-antiparticle pairs are constantly popping into and out of existence for extremely short periods.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy: A large portion of the universe’s total energy and mass is composed of dark matter and dark energy, which do not interact with light and are therefore invisible to us, but are present throughout space.
Because it’s invisible, dark matter is hypothetical. There were gravitational effects that could not be explained, and the idea of dark matter solves the difficulty. Who knows what else is out there to be discovered?
One more titbit: According to
Wikipedia, the term ‘outer space’ was popularised by the author H G Wells after 1901. The Wikipedia link above has lots of other information, some of it quite scientific.
Ann Marie Thomas is the author of five medieval history books, a surprisingly cheerful poetry collection about her 2010 stroke and two further poetry collections, and the science fiction series Flight of the Kestrel, of which there are four books are out now. Follow her at http://eepurl.com/bbOsyz and get free books.
