You know how it goes. You spend so much time staring into the night sky and pondering the big mysteries, you get all freaked out and have to go inside where it’s bright and safe. And who can blame you?

It’s like the great man said: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine.”

Strange indeed. How is it that 96 percent of the universe is comprised of stuff we can’t see? Why is gravity so weak? Is it leaking into an unseen dimension? What might we find in those dimensions? Are there other versions of us in there, living parallel lives but with different outcomes?

See? I’m getting freaked out.

Today, science is catching up with the questions, but we’ve got more theories than facts. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the very real possibility that our universe exists in a greater multiverse.

Imagine it: We live in a universe billions of light years across, but it may be nothing more than a tiny bubble in a frothing sea of similar bubbles. Was the Big Bang nearly 14 million years ago the result of two of those bubbles crashing into each other? Or is reality even stranger?

Maybe the whole damn thing is just the sudsy residue of some higher being’s science experiment and we reside in a great petri dish too grand for us to ever see. To the designer of this experiment, our whole universe is in and out of existence in an attosecond. Relativity being what it is, to us it feels like near eternity.
Somebody turn on the lights.

Perhaps the Large Hadron Collider — which will smash protons together and reveal clues in the aftermath — can cast light on some of this once it’s up and running in the fall.

In the meantime, there are those who not only seek the answers to these unsettling questions, they open their doors and share what they know with the rest of us uneducated curious.

At the Southworth Planetarium at the University of Southern Maine, such work is under way. Under a giant star dome theater, there are astronomy shows each week, and introductory classes start at the middle of the month.

Astronomer Edward Gleason is the manager of the planetarium and a man who recognizes that education is the only solution to unquenched curiosity.

So what can we see in this 30-foot dome with its state-of-the-art laser system, digital sound and 50 slide and special effects projectors?

“That all depends upon what you want to see,” says Gleason. “We have our traditional star projector that generates a star field. We have other equipment capable of showing you images of the planets, nebulae, galaxies, both statically and dynamically. We have shows about the Hubble space telescope, black holes, stars, the solar system, dinosaurs and much more. The Star Dome Astronomy course uses the star field and some of the other equipment to help us illustrate many of the concepts discussed in the class.”

The saddest fact of all to me is that it’s certain all of us — scientists and lay people alike — will have very little understanding about the true state of the universe before we die. Our children won’t and their children won’t either. Given the expansiveness of the mysteries, the pace of our learning is set on sundial.

“We are so small and our time here so brief,” says Gleason, “that it is a wonder we know much of anything at all.”

NASA won’t let me have a spaceship and I’m not allowed inside the super-collider. So in advance of the class, I’ve been asking Gleason the big questions.

Do we know how big the universe is? Do our brains even have the capacity to imagine things of such immensity?

“I am going to say no,” Gleason says. “I think it is safe to say that the proportions of our cosmos are so vast that it would be impossible to truly understand the true magnitude of the universe we inhabit. If I could offer a single example: On a clear, dark night we can see approximately 5,000 stars. One might wonder how much of the galaxy we actually see in a dark sky. Let’s imagine we have a large index card containing 5,000 dots. Provided the dots were small enough, one could hold a 5,000-dot card in one hand. Our galaxy has about 400 billion stars. To have this number of dots, one would have to place another 5,000-dot card next to the first one. Then, one would have to make a column of these index cards extending from Portland down to Florida more than 1,697 miles away! Compare a two-card column of dots extending down the entire eastern seaboard to a single card of dots gives us an idea of how small a view of the galaxy one has by observing even the darkest sky.”

If that doesn’t make you feel smaller than a quark, maybe you should try it with visual enhancements. Outfits like the Southworth Planetarium bring the skies down, in a sense, so mortals like you can observe and study them and form your own questions and ideas.

“Seeing a diagram on a chalkboard is often not as helpful as being under a dome sky,” Gleason says, in a stroke of understatement.

In the dome, Gleason can reveal the normal matter that we all see when we look up at the sky: stars, galaxies, planets, etc. He can show you the vast regions of seemingly empty space between those bodies and then explain how something out there — something entirely invisible to us — is causing it all to fly apart.

He can show you how strangely uniform the universe is laid out and then explain — or try to — how the whole thing arose from virtually nothing.

“The concept that the entire universe was born out of a super-kernel of space-time, matter and energy is not one that reconciles itself easily with our intuition,” Gleason says. “According to cosmologists, everything in the cosmos was confined to this singular point that inflated to become the universe we inhabit today. One can explain the concept while not necessarily aiding a student with truly grasping the notion.”

Not that you have to possess a Stephen Hawking-esque grasp of physics to handle the course. At the planetarium, they’ll start you off with the basics: finding the north star, reading star charts, spotting constellations.

You know: simple stuff that won’t cause you to sleep with a light on.

But don’t limit yourself, Galileo. If it’s the big questions that burn like super novae in your mind, the planetarium is a good place to begin your hunt for answers whether you’ve been wondering for eight years or for 80.

“I’ve seen first-graders and senior citizens equally engaged by what we have to offer,” Gleason says. “Astronomy is such a wide topic, it can accommodate a variety of interests: from those who want to find Saturn in their backyard telescopes to those who want to know about exploding stars.”

Yes, exploding stars. Some are so massive when they collapse, the result is a region of such concentrated mass that nothing — not even light — can escape. And over the edge of their weird event horizons might be wormholes, alternate dimensions and other things to make us squirm and marvel.

“Ah, one of those Twilight Zone moments,” says Gleason. “I’ll tell you, every so often I think … people take a moment to contemplate our place in the grand scheme of things, and if one ponders too much, one could start sweating Howitzer shells.”

“If you ask me though,” he says, “that’s fantastic. Who wants a prosaic universe? Let mysticism and the unknown lurk in the margins.”

What: Southworth Planetarium Star Dome Astronomy
When: Starting Sept. 22, six weeks of classes each Tuesday from 7-9 p.m.
Where: The Science Building on the USM campus, Franklin Street, Portland
How much: $50 enrollment ($35 for members)
What else: Astronomy shows, Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m., $5 children, $6 adult
More info: Visit www.usm.maine.edu/planet; call 780-4249; or e-mail egleason@usm.maine.edu

 Coming in 2012: aliens! Maybe…

When will life be discovered elsewhere in the cosmos? This author, after a long and careful study of FATE Magazine and Outer Limits reruns, predicts such a detection will be made in the summer of 2012. Professional astronomer Edward Gleason, with a college education and real telescopes and such, is not so optimistic. In his words:

“Oh, heavens, you are more confident than I. Presently, the Kepler spacecraft is observing 100,000 stars within the direction of Cygnus the Swan. The Kepler mission is designed to find Earth-sized planets in orbit around other stars. The mission finds these planets by observing any brightness diminishment that the stars would experience when a planet transits across it. By this technique, even relatively small Earth-like planets might be found. I am hopeful that this transit method will prove effective at the discovery of such planets. However, I don’t want to make any predictions about finding life elsewhere in the universe yet.”

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