-
-
- What happens if you focus a telescope at a single spot in the dark sky and collect all the light for 140 hours? The long time exposure collects enough light to image thousands of never before seen galaxies.
-
- This Hubble Deep Field exposure took 150 orbits staring at a single spot of the dark sky just above the Big Dipper ( Ursa Major Constellation). 4 different filters were used, ultraviolet, blue, yellow and far red. This 140 hours of exposure was first competed in 1996.
-
- The image from this time exposure was a view 11 billion years backwards in time. The early galaxies were smaller in size, irregular, and knotty in shape.
-
- How do astronomers know that these faintest galaxies are actually 11 billion lightyears distant and less than 2 billion years old?
-
- Looking past our Solar System, past distant galaxies, past distant galaxy clusters, we enter a deep universe populated by super clusters of galaxies, long filaments interconnecting them, and colossal voids of near empty space in between.
-
- We are part of the Virgo Supercluster. We used to think that it was the largest gravity bound group inside the expanding universe. Our home VirgoSupercluster is 100,000,000 lightyears across. However, new discoveries have found we are bound to other superclusters that together span 500,000,000 lightyears across. The larger group is named “Laniakea”. It is the Hawaiian word for “ immense heaven”.
-
- These distance measurements are made using the brightness of light and the broadening of the spectrum wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation traveling through expanding space. For example: Astronomers measure the relative motion of these galaxies by the shift in frequency of a particular wavelength of radiation. Blue shifted galaxies are moving toward us and red shifted galaxies are moving away from us. Astronomers use the strength of radio waves to estimate how much energy the galaxies release in visible light.
-
- When all this data is collected together what emerges is galaxies huddling together in super clusters with massive voids of space in between them. The clumps of galaxies are inner connected by “strings” of galaxies. The image becomes one of a Cosmic Web.
-
- The Dark Matter that astronomers can not see appears to be occupying a thicker scaffolding supporting the cosmic web. Dark Matter is only detected by its gravitational interactions with normal matter. This unknown material holding filaments and superclusters together has 5 times the mass as the “Normal Matter” that we can see.
-
-
- Astronomers discovered that more distant galaxies had a light spectrum shifted into the red and infrared wavelengths meaning the farther galaxies were moving away faster than the nearer galaxies and the Universe was therefore expanding.
-
- The most common element in the Universe is hydrogen and hydrogen atoms most commonly emit and absorb the single wavelength of 91.2 nanometers. This causes a break in the continuous light spectrum. Observing this hydrogen break in galaxy light that are 11 billion lightyears away has a redshift emitted in the ultraviolet and detected in blue wavelengths. Some detected wavelengths have shifted all the way to the infrared wavelengths. Traveling across expanding space expands radiation into wider and wider wavelengths.
-
- Looking into the depths of the expanding Universe has brought other new discoveries. For Example: The peak star formation occurred 10 to 12 billion years ago.
-
- A huge hole in the Universe was discovered dwarfing any other structure. It is nearly a billion lightyears across. This region is devoid of stars, gas, and any ordinary matter, and any Dark Matter. It is located 6 to 10 billion lightyears away and astronomers have no explanation for its existence.
-
- Still another problem persists: When astronomers create a detailed inventory of all the matter and energy evidence they can “see” they come up with only 5% of what their calculations say should be out there. 95% of the Universe is “missing”. The ratios of matter to energy tell us that 22% of this is missing Dark Matter and 73% is missing Dark Energy. It is the enormous amount of Dark Energy that is expanding the Universe at an ever acceleration rate.
-
- Gravitational Lensing has been the primary tool used to confirm these discoveries. When light passes a massive object like a cluster of galaxies and other unseen Dark Matter the light is bent just like a light beam passing through a glass magnifying glass. The amount of bending is used to calculate the amount of total mass that is there. And, that total mass is 5 times more than can be seen.
-
- Some of this Dark Matter could be neutrinos. But, neutrinos account for a very small part of the total missing mass. The larger part is still unknown and dubbed to be “ WIMPS”., weakly, interactive, massive particles. WIMPS have yet to be discovered. They exist in theory only.
-
- Dark Energy on the other hand is large scale “ anti-gravity” that is pushing galaxy clusters apart. We know what it does, but, have no idea what it is.
-
- The picture started 13,820,000,000 years ago. The Universe expanded and cooled to 3,000 degrees Kelvin ( 4,900F) in just 380,000 years. At that point vibrating protons could grab nearby vibrating electrons and form neutral atoms of hydrogen. When these two charged particles were neutralized light photons were set free to escape into this “first light“. Previously these photons were pin balls bouncing continuously between the sea of charged particles.
-
- Today astronomers can see this escape event as a sea of cool microwave glow ( Cosmic Microwave Background radiation). It occurred 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The 3,000 Kelvin radiation has since expanded and cooled to 2.73Kelvin. The radiation wavelengths stretched out in the expanding Universe from gamma rays to now microwaves. The tiny differences in temperature in this cooling and expanding sea of particles allowed the denser regions to condense into galaxies and the lesser dense regions into voids.
-
- These first galaxies were a million times smaller than our today’s Milky Way Galaxy. These small irregular galaxies formed a billion years after the Big Bang. 3 billion years later you see the Universe we have today. 4.32 billion years after the Big Bang I am sending you this review of how it all happened to bring us to where we are today.
-
- Today the Universe is immensely huge, beyond comprehension. If the Sun is a grain of sand the Milky Way alone would be 40,000 miles across.
-
- The Universe extends 13.8 billion lightyears in all directions in time and distance. That is 13,800,000,000 lightyears with each lightyear being 6,000,000,000,000 miles. And, during the time for that light to reach us the Universe has expanded to 93 billion lightyears across as that more distant light is still traveling to reach us. And, 93 billion lightyears of Universe is only the “Visible Universe”. The Universe beyond that horizon is so distant and expanding so fast the light will never reach us. The furthest expansion is moving away faster than the speed of light and still accelerating. More of that Universe that we can see in moving into that part of the Universe that we will never see. Light only travels 186,000 miles per second. Expansion faster than that means the light never, never gets here.
-
- In this real sense the Universe appears to be dieing?
-
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The Hubble Space Telescope orbits Earth every 96.6 minutes. See Review #1780 to learn how this calculation was made. (math).
-
- Astronomers have detected active Blackholes scattered across this Cosmic Web. The most distant Blackholes existed only 750 million years after the Big Bang. That is 13 billion lightyears away and 13 billion years ago. These bright active Blackholes are called “ Quasars”.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------- RSVP, Pass it on to whomever is interested. ----------------
--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email comments, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews
- to: ------- jamesdetrick@comcast.net ------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
- https://plus.google.com/u/0/ -- www.facebook.com -- www.twitter.com
----- 707-536-3272 ---------------------- Wednesday, December 9, 2015 -----
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment