Scientists Detected Mysterious "Morse Code"

In the vast abyss of the cosmos, amidst the stellar tapestry, lies the Milky Way. Not just a river of stars, but our very abode. Envision a gargantuan pinwheel spanning eons, rotating in the void of space. A place born from time's earliest whispers around 14 billion years ago, a dominion of starlight, nebulae, and cosmic wonders. It houses not just celestial bodies but stories—yours, mine, and even that untidy child from down the lane.

Picture a canvas so wide, taking a hundred millennia for a beam of light to traverse. Within it, our sun, a mere speck, takes 250 million years to complete its cosmic marathon around the galaxy's heart. And when night graces our world, those myriad twinkling eyes above, most are part of the Milky Way's sprawling limbs. This river of starlight was once an enigma to our ancestors, a milky stroke across the heavens, hence the galaxy's poetic name.

Hold your breath for a twist in the tale. From the heart of this stellar expanse, a curious signal emanates, like the dots and dashes of Morse code. There exists a mysterious message, perhaps a celestial whisper. Decades passed, we spotted gigantic tendrils hanging ominously close to the enigmatic Sagittarius A*, our galaxy's heart harboring a monstrous black hole.

Recent revelations have unveiled new tendrils, puzzlingly shorter, their orientations odd, reminiscent of spokes radiating from a wheel's hub. Though the tendrils share common traits, their origins are believed to differ. Towering vertical ones pierce the cosmos, while the horizontal siblings evoke Morse code's eloquence, the former magnetic, while the latter exudes thermal warmth.

These baffling phenomena, though celestial in scale, may help unveil the secrets of our galaxy's central black hole. Yet, the mysteries don't end there. From the depths came another signal, frequent pulsations unlike any celestial body we know. Its origin is ambiguous, some speculated to be remnants of a collapsed star, while others ponder the existence of an entirely unknown celestial object.

And as if the galaxy wasn't enigmatic enough, a new conundrum arises. Our gamma-ray telescope unveiled an intense glow from the Milky Way's core. For a decade, this luminescence baffled minds. Is it the cataclysmic destruction of elusive dark matter, or is it the dance of millisecond pulsars, neutron stars spinning at unimaginable speeds? Debates rage, with the pulsars being prime suspects, yet skepticism abounds.

Some postulate it could be due to cosmic interactions, while others question the peculiar spherical congregation of these pulsars. The galaxy, with all its grandeur, remains a labyrinth of riddles. All we can do is persist in our quest, diving deeper into the enigma that is our celestial home. Within this vast cosmic theater, every revelation begets more questions, and every answer we unearth draws us further into an intricate dance of wonder and uncertainty.

Every star, each pulsar, every tendril, is not just a point of light or a phenomenon but a chapter in the grand tale of our universe. We, as humble residents of this Milky Way, are constantly driven by an insatiable curiosity. With every tool we forge, in every telescope we peer through, we seek to understand our place in the vastness, to decipher the messages encoded in the fabric of space and time.

These mysteries, from the Morse code-like tendrils to the inexplicable gamma rays, are beckoning calls for humanity. They whisper to us of stories yet to be told, of puzzles waiting to be solved, and of our ever-evolving understanding of the cosmos. In the face of these revelations, we are reminded of how much there is still to learn, and yet, with every discovery, we inch closer to understanding the intricate ballet of the universe.

So, you're driving down the highway, and an 18-wheel tractor-trailer is coming up fast behind you. You've got to change lanes. You look in the mirror, is there enough space? And you've noticed the words on the mirror, "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear." No kidding. Well, it's the same with the Milky Way galaxy. There's another galaxy headed this way, and like the tractor-trailer, it's closer than it looks.

The Andromeda galaxy, or M31 as it was labeled originally by Charles Messier in his catalog of 110 fuzzy objects in 1774, is now officially named NGC-122. A spiral galaxy larger than the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy is so big and so close that you can see it without a telescope. In fact, it appears with the unaided eye, half as wide as the moon. It's estimated that the Andromeda galaxy contains one trillion stars compared with the Milky Way's estimated 300 to 400 billion measly stars.

To see the Andromeda galaxy, you must allow your eyes to become dark adapted; this might take about 10 minutes while your pupils dilate to take in as much light as possible. M31 is best seen from late summer through winter when the Great Square of Pegasus, the winged horse, is overhead. Draw a line across the Great Square diagonally upwards from the lower corner star, then go a little further beyond the square. There it is.

But you still won't be able to see how big it is unless you peek at it from the corners of your eyes. If you stare straight at it, the galaxy will tend to fade away. You must use your peripheral vision to see how big the Andromeda galaxy appears. Peripheral vision, or averted vision, allows you to see light more sensitively at night. But without color.

Sailors have used averted vision for centuries to see faint lights out on the ocean or on land. Aristotle used averted vision to observe star cluster M41 in Canis Major, as he described in his book "Meteorology." In a telescopic photograph, the Andromeda galaxy appears six times wider than the moon because, with the unaided eye, we can only see the bright center of the galaxy. A telescopic photograph shows how massive M31's spiral arms really are.

This beast of a galaxy is headed our way. We are looking at a future massive collision of galaxies, of well, galactic proportions. When that happens, humanity may need to relocate to another galaxy to inhabit. Perhaps we'll go to the Pinwheel Galaxy in the asterism of the Big Dipper. But how do we know the Andromeda galaxy is moving toward us? With a tool called a spectroscope.

After the camera, the spectroscope is the most important attachment to a telescope. Astronomers can tell which direction objects in space are moving, as well as which elements are making the light. When you hear an ambulance approaching, you hear the siren getting louder and higher. And when it passes you and goes away, you hear the siren sound get weaker and lower. The change in pitch (frequency) depends entirely on the motion of the source, called the Doppler effect.

The ambulance siren is not changing its volume; the sound waves are being compressed as it is approaching and stretched as the ambulance recedes. The spectroscope shows that light waves show the same Doppler effect.