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The night time sky is filled with many wonders.
Some can readily be explained while others
leave us to wonder with our imaginations as
to the hows and whys of such mysteries that
challenge us for the answers. We know from
observations of our own sun that these brilliant
points of light are spacial nuclear fusion power
plants that radiate both heat that warms our Earth
and lights it during the day when our rotating
globe faces the sun.
It takes appoxiamately seven minutes for light to reach the Earth from the sun (as opposed to the millions of years it takes one photon of light to reach the surface of the sun from its core). In other words, where you see the sun is where it was seven minutes ago. You can never really see it at it's true position in the daytime sky. The same can be said for any star in the night time sky. In fact, the night time sky has more visual illusions than one realizes. For instance, the closest star to us is four light years away. That means it takes sixteen years before the light of that star reaches the Earth. As seen in the night time sky is where it would have been sixteen years ago. And that's just the closest star to us. The majority of the stars we see are much, much further away from us. The Hubble Telescope has shown that there are an infinitesimal number of stars in all that darkness we see between the visible stars. These stars could easily be millions of lights years away from our home planet. What is being viewed then are stars whose light has traveled more than four million years in time and space. Considering that our own sun will burn out in a few billion years, it's quite possible that what we are viewing is what the star |
once looked like before it's final demise. In other words,
we are looking at something that is no longer there.
Hasn't been there for millions of years.
If it's possible for us to look at the past history of any
given star, then it's also possible that the connect the
dots game we play with the stars in the form of
constellations may need to be reconsidered. After all,
how does any one know that any star in any given
constellation still exists? Even if it did, the way we
perceive our universe is still yet another illusion. Our
limited sensory perception of the universe does not
permit us to see it in it's true three dimensional
perspective. That's why we can play the two
dimensional connect the dots game with the stars
above us and call them constellations. In all
actuality, the stars of any given constellation could be
thousands of light years apart from one another with
some of the stars being more toward the foreground,
some more toward the background, while the rest lie
somewhere in between.
The latest illusion involves the age of the universe. The accepted age of the universe in now in question. It seems there are some stars out there that are older than the age of the universe itself. It's the child being older than the parent type of scenario. Just how is this possible? One possible answer may lie in existence of black holes. When a super massive star goes through it's final stages of nuclear fusion, the gravity is so intense that it collapses on to itself. In the process, anything within it's vicinity gets pulled in to a black hole that has been formed by the dying star. Everything that goes in doesn't come out. Not even light itself can escape the intense gravitational pull of a black hole. Any matter entering into a black hole would continue to collapse |
until it reached a radius of zero, or as mathematicians
would say, a point of singularity.
There are three kinds of black holes though we are
interested in the supermassive ones. These are the ones
that could quite conceiveably be the center of galaxies
(and perhaps one reason for the formation of galaxies)
including our own. If that were the case, then our solar
system and everything in our galaxy is slowly rotating its
way around the event horizon of a supermassive black
hole. Eventually, though not anytime soon, everything
circling around it will be absorbed into the supermassive
black hole. This brings about the question of what happens
when everything in it's area has been consumed. How dense
can the point of singularity get before something has to give?
Can the intense gravity retain all that has been consumed?
What happens when gravity reaches its limit to contain a
sustained amount of dense matter?
This is where imagination takes over. It could be conceivable that gravity gives way to something more spectacular that has yet to be observed in the skies above us; a big bang. While it has been widely accepted that the universe is a product of one such big bang, is it too far a stretch to say that it is a product not of one singular big bang but of several that has taken place since its inception? It may provide the reason for some parts of the universe being older than what was previously thought to be an accepted age for the universe. It wouldn't be a case of the child being born before the adult parent then, but of a child being born among it's elderly population. And that would be the grandest illusion of them all if one day that was proven to be true...... |