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-1584 - Universe lifetimes. The stars, the galaxies, and the Universe itself as a life cycle we are trying to understand. X-rays are giving us a new vision on the scene.
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- Lifetimes are changing. Stone age man had an average lifetime of 20 years. Today the average lifespan is 67 years and still climbing. At the age of the dinosaurs the year lasted 370 days. Today it is only 365.256366 days long. The Earth wobbles through the plane of the Solar System every 100,000 years. Last year the Universe was 13.7 billion years old.
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- This year the age of the Universe is 13.8 billion years. More Cosmic Microwave Background data now available from new spacecraft has brought us new data. The recalculation is a 7% increase in the age of the Universe ,but, it is 100,000,000 years older. Our planets were thought to have formed in the Solar System in less than 200,000,000 years. That happened 4.5 billion years ago.
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- We believe the Universe is expanding to try to achieve a lower state of entropy. Entropy is randomness, or a high state of disorder. The Big Bang started with the lowest state of entropy in uniform order. The disorder and entropy has been increasing ever sense. Energy always seeks to reach its lowest level. Entropy always seeks to reach its highest level.
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- Gravity opposes the expansion and where pockets of gas were higher density stars would form. As gravity crushes matter fusion creates radiation that opposes gravity. The balance of forces determines the lifetimes of stars. Dark Matter’s gravity collects stars into galaxies. In between Dark Matter galaxies and cluster of galaxies is Dark Energy. Dark Energy is like the radiation in space that is expanding space moving the galaxies away from each other. The voids between them are expanding bubbles of space.
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- Eventually we will be in a single bubble that will be our Observable Universe. Everything else will have expanded so far their light will never reach us.
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- The stars have a lifetime determined by their mass. The largest stars burn their nuclear fuel quickly and die as supernovae in only a few million years. Smaller stars like our Sun have lifetimes of 10 billion years. Our Sun will die as a White Dwarf star. It is not big enough to go supernova. Red Dwarf stars and Brown Dwarf stars that are smaller still will live for 100 trillion years as they slowly cool down.
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- Galaxies eventually evaporate. Protons eventually decay into photons. That will take another 10^40 years. Blackholes will also eventually evaporate and decay. For that you will have to wait 10^100 years. That is really a long time.
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- Is the Universe really flying apart? Or, is Mother Nature fooling us? Astronomers see the Universe as expanding because the light from distant galaxies is redshifted by the time it reaches. the light’s wavelength is stretched due to traveling through expanding space over its entire journey.
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- The light that astronomers can gather from the edge of the Observable Universe is only 1 photon per second. Could there be large scale factors that have unknown properties? Maybe the Cosmos is not uniform? Maybe expanding space is an illusion? In many ways we are flooded with data and starving for knowledge.
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- Chandra is a large space telescope built to purposely collect fewer photons and build up an image over a long focusing time. The images are recreated by computer software that uses the photon brightness differences and the grazing angles to “ see” with fewer photons. The detectors collect a few hundred photons, each having very high energy in the X-ray frequency range. X-rays range from 10 nanometers wavelength to as short as 0.01 nanometers wavelength.
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- The entire sky is diffused in X-ray energy. Where does this energy come from? In may have started out as Gamma Rays and been redshifted into lower energy X-rays?
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- The moon reflects X-rays and the minerals on its surface fluoresce. The X-rays get absorbed and visible light get re-emitted from the surface.
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- The Sun creates X-rays in its magnetic fields at its surface. The magnetic field lines break and reconnect creating high temperature X-rays.
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- The Blackhole at the center of our Galaxy is the brightest X-ray source. Binary Stars where one star steals mass from the other creates another source of bright X-rays. Gravity and magnetic fields accelerate ionized particles into jets and shockwaves. When ionized particles slam into gas and dust their deceleration emits radiation heating the gas clouds to millions of degrees. Thermal radiation emits in all directions along with X-rays.
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- These studies are telling astronomers how galaxies go through their lifecycles. Astronomers want to learn how did we get form the Big Bang to spiral galaxies orbiting Blackholes separated by voids of empty space? The more astronomers can “ see “ the better we can understand the life cycles of the Universe. An announcement will be made shortly, stay tuned.
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RSVP, please reply with a number to rate this review: #1- learned something new. #2 - Didn’t read it. #3- very interesting. #4- Send another review #___ from the index. #5- Keep em coming. #6- I forwarded copies to some friends. #7- Don‘t send me these anymore! #8- I am forwarding you some questions? Index is available with email upon request. Some reviews are at http://jdetrick.blogspot.com Please send feedback, corrections, or recommended improvements to: jamesdetrick@comcast.net. ---- “Jim Detrick” -- www.facebook.com, -- www.twitter.com, -- 707-536-3272 Friday, March 29, 2013
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