Post
by jjohnson » Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:22 pm
Well, I agree that a galaxy could go out, but maybe just its being within one of the really large-scale intergalactic currents shepherds its location and helps keep it in the current flow. Now, we don't really know why or where from these filamentary webs of currents go or what drives them. There's no way of knowing if the webs of currents in the observable universe are simply a miniature subset of a part of the rest of the universe (one stage of the fractal) and there are other ever-larger currents moving everything along and maintaining safe rights-of-way and what-not.
What happens eventually in the galactic model driven by gravity, over time? At some point all the stars will eventually live out their allotted span on the H-R diagram and go out, or change. Some of the energy bound up in the largest ones will be released back into the neighborhood in the form of supernova explosions, to add heavier elements and energy formerly bound up in holding the star together and driving fusion processes. That energy supposedly sets off waves of fresh new star birth. The smaller remainders turn into dwarf stars, many of which can't sustain fusion any longer because of insufficient gravity heating, so they act like charcoal embers slowly cooling and fading out - into precisely what I haven't read. Maybe frozen Neptunes? Snow cones? The more massive a condensed matter body is, the slower its rate of heat radiation, so it could take a very long time before all the stars in a galaxy operating under the Gravity Model would be "gone" - not performing as stars. Eventually as all the large stars get parted out and everything is either small or in the black hole dumpster in the center, there is not sufficient energy left, having been all radiated away, and it's just cold masses of near-zero Kelvin clumps of matter and black holes, the galaxies' getting further and further away from each other by the inexorable expansion of the universe. The EU model does not buy into this viewpoint, I might add, lest anyone misinterpret me.
As far as I think we can observe, without extrapolating outside our data set, things will plug along, changing, moving, recycling - for an "indefinite" amount of time. We do not have good evidence, frankly, of how long the universe has existed, nor of how long it will exist. We can't see any better into the past than into the future, and if you don't believe me (a reasonable statement for skeptics to make) read the evidence in The Black Swan and think on that, dear hearts.
Recall that the Big Bang theory has too many holes in its arguments to be entirely plausible. We do NOT observe evidence for it in the cosmic microwave background. The deep-field galaxies, that Hubble captures out at the observable edge of where we are able to see, look surprisingly well formed and similar to galaxies today, and they seem to keep going, spaced out until they disappear from view. The Big Bang is simply one of a lot of competing ideas for what might have happened, and the longer its predictions don't pan out and evidence does not corroborate that model too well, the less plausible it will seem. I don't bother with it simply because that was then and this is now. Now is what we are working with, and I think the observable universe that we see is the way it works with 3 dimensions and a perception of time so that things are causal in a logical sort of way. No tricks are intentionally hidden under the sleeves. It's up to us to figure out the rules which are implicit in the view laid out around us.
