The Galactic Times InDepth Previews

In the United States, there are over a dozen astroblemes—star wounds—with visible surface structure.   In this first exploration, call it a tongue-in-cheek EarthX trip, let more than your imagination roam over one such impact feature, a crater hiding in plain sight:  the Wetumpka Crater, in Alabama.  

What if we could take a drilled core of stellar information, a census in tubes in several spatial directions?  What would we learn? A space mission named Gaia has in a few short years made all that came before seem like just a precursor. How about if we chose three common reference points, and used Gaia as our core drilling rig and see what our cores find for us?  Let us venture to the three north celestial poles—the equatorial “Celestial” pole, the Ecliptic pole, and the Galactic pole—and dig  down (or perhaps, upwards) from the ‘surface’ level—the Solar System–on outwards and discover what the cores reveal.

          In one of those science fictional universes, that of Star Trek, a highly speculative yet remarkably cohesive and organized alternative universe, a United Federation of Planets went exploring our galaxy.  Though it may have been Earth-centered, was it as galaxy-wide as it claimed?  Was there any organization to the Federation?  Where would it be?Do the stellar and  planetary systems bear any resemblance to reality or are they just all made up in the heads of writers?  Are there any real technosignatures we can detect for the Star Trek universe?

A personal story as well as a scientific look at one of the most unusual objects in the universe, a microquasar, known as SS 433, originally called K16 if you want to know some trivia. Why? Read on and then pull down the PDF.