Today is Freaky Friday and I'll be appearing at Lori's Reading Corner. I hope you'll stop by and read an excerpt from my latest book, Secrets of a Dangerous Woman, and read a special post I wrote for Lori. One lucky follower will win a basket of goodies from the town of Lumberton, where the series takes place.
When I was in school (oh so many decades ago) I was taught there were 9 planets in our solar system.
But just in the past 20 years (that's since 1992) scientists have discovered our solar system may have as many as 500,000,000,000 planets. (Yep, that is 500 Billion.)
When we look at the night sky with naked eyes, we see stars and our moon. If we're lucky, we might catch a meteor or at certain times of the year, another planet.
When we look through a telescope invented prior to 1990, we see more of our solar system - the additional planets, stars and moons were there all along but it took a special lens to see them.
Today we have high powered telescopes such as those operated by the Southern European Observatory in northern Chili. These telescopes can detect objects that are 400,000,000,000 times fainter than the naked eye can see.
We also have unmanned spacecraft such as Kepler that are capable of detecting and analyzing planets, stars, moons and suns in our galaxy and beyond.
In the coming years, will we discover life on other planets? What do you think? Is our perception of our universe changing right before our eyes?
