"Great Galactic Barrier" -Star Trek Science Fiction or Fact?
The Galactic Barrier, often referred to as the "Energy Barrier", or "The Great Barrier" in the science fiction
universe of Star Trek,is an energy field that completely encompasses the galactic disk of the Milky Way and prevents conventional starship travel beyond the edge of the galaxy.
The Barrier made its first appeared in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" where the crew of the USS Enterprise had to deal with those affected by the powerful telekinetic and telepathic powers of the field as the ship's power and engines shut down and navigational systems became erratic.
Trekkie theory has suggested the natural or artificial barrier (we're not sure which!) is not meant to keep explorers "in" the galaxy, but to keep something from beyond the galaxy "out". Throughout the series, attempts to travel outside the galaxy were made with the barrier usually damaging or destroying starships that tried to voyage through.
In one of the most memorable of the "Great Barrier" episodes, "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" the Enterprise becomes lost inside the barrier and is saved by the incredible navigational skills of an alien passenger.
So, is the Great Barrier science fact, or a singular brilliant work of imagination?
The reality is not a "barrier," but a halo -a roughly spherical halo of ancient stars thought to be among the oldest objects in the universe -some as old as 18 billion years- called globular clusters. Beyond is an even larger, invisible spherical halo of dark matter that may contain up to 10 times the mass of the observable Milky Way.
But even more exciting is the "Final Frontier" journey to the galactic center, a large bulge several thousand light years across that is believed to harbor a massive black hole a million times larger that the Sun.
Scientists were startled in 2004 when they discovered that the
center of our galaxy is emitting gamma rays with energies in the tens
of trillions of electron volts. This past March, astrophysicists at The
University of Arizona, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the
University of Adelaide (Australia) discovered a mechanism that might
produce these high-energy gamma rays.
The black hole at the
center of our Milky Way could be working like a cosmic particle
accelerator, shooting up protons that smash at incredible speeds into
lower energy protons and creating high-energy gamma rays, they reported.
"It's
similar to the same kind of particle physics experiments that the Large
Hadron Collider at CERN will perform," UA astrophysicist David
Ballantyne said, describing their search for the unltimate "God
Particle," the Higgs boson.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Related Galaxy posts:
Andromeda Galaxy & Its Mystery Core: Destined to Merge With the Milky Way?
Neutron Stars & The Physics of Star Trek
New, Revised Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A Single Oxygen Atom's Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth...and Beyond
Black Holes Key to Mapping the Evolution of the Universe
Source: The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss.
Great article, but be careful about what you write: isn't the universe only about 13.7 billion years old? So how can there be objects out there that are as old as 18 billion years? :s
Posted by: Laurens Van Keer | December 12, 2007 at 07:02 AM
Actually thats not a typo its correct the globular clusters show an age greater then that believed to be the max age of the universe. They cant explain it and it shows a flaw in our dating of the universe.
Posted by: Steven | March 24, 2008 at 01:24 AM
I think that this article is awsome! This article made a lot of since but I an not agree that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old. That is how old our galaxey is, isn't it? I wish you can tell us how you find out the age of things in our universe.
Posted by: Taylor Rooks | July 05, 2008 at 08:09 PM
Carbon dating, Taylor, carbon dating!
Posted by: Marty Ferguson | November 20, 2008 at 08:35 PM