Some Astronomers Finally Realize The Universe Isn't Flying Apart At All

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Finally, some astronomers are edging closer and closer to what I know: the universe, far from everything shooting away from each other is really sliding together as the mega-black holes bend space and time, causing all other galaxies to rotate into them until there will be only a few mega-galaxies that will then fall into each other and once they compress themselves into nearly nothing, will Big Bang all over again.

Nature:

Cyclic universe could explain cosmic balancing act

Why is the energy pushing apart the Universe so small? Maybe because it's much older than we thought.

© NASA
A bouncing universe that expands and then shrinks every trillion years or so could explain one of the most puzzling problems in cosmology: how we can exist at all.

If this explanation, proposed in Science1 by Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University, New Jersey, and Neil Turok at the University of Cambridge, UK, seems slightly preposterous, that can't really be held against it. Astronomical observations over the past decade have shown that "we live in a preposterous universe", says cosmologist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. "It's our job to make sense of it," he says.

In Steinhardt and Turok's cyclic model of the Universe, it expands and contracts repeatedly over timescales that make the 13.7 billion years that have passed since the Big Bang seem a mere blink. This makes the Universe vastly old. And that in turn means that the mysterious 'cosmological constant', which describes how empty space appears to repel itself, has had time to shrink into the strangely small number that we observe today.

Nature abhors a straight line. Inside of even seemingly straight looking objects there is curvature. Draw anything in nature and one can see the sense of curvature. Even if you look at the horizon and it looks flat, it is not flat, it is merely perspective. If you become an eagle and fly high, the earth isn't flat at all!

So it is with the Universe. We are, in the Milky Way, at the outer edge of the Great Attractor's cyclonic hole. It is like a huge hurricane, it turns round and round and space curves around it and all the galaxies that are in our quadrant of space and time circle around the Great Attractor, this is why they look "clumpy" to us when we see the whole picture from our latitude of being on the same plane as they, indeed, they make a curving line, hundreds and thousands of galaxies, like the planets circling the sun, they circle the Great Attractor all of them on the same axial plane.

The drawing I did above is yet another attempt to show how things flow away from the impulsive force of the Big Bang only to be captured at the outer edges of that impulsive force and then rotate along the same plane to the same terminus point, in our case, the Great Attractor. How like a fern frond or a sea shell it is! This is because Nature has this queer fondness for such shapes. Maybe it is Her feminine side.

If you observe a baseball in midflight for about 0.1 seconds, it looks like it is on a fairly flat trajectory. Our views of the cosmos are split second snapshots. So we can suppose or surmise to our heart's content but we can't see much in the way of actual movement. Computer simulations of various galaxies colliding with each other shows clearly that the main energy at work is for them to coalence after many passes with each other as they spiral down, together.

Closer in, binary stars most likely are dense dwarf or black holes indenting space so badly, any stars moving around the Milky Way's core (everything is spiralling, you know, all the time!) glides helplessly into the nearby black hole's sphere of influence and eventually gets sucked dry of all matter and then merges which often causes a massive explosion if it is a big star.

This process continues at many levels simultaneously. As comets circle the sun and eventually fall into it or shatter apart while traveling and slamming into planets explosively, so does everything in our cosmos. Our dear planet has been spared any horrors like this destruction because we are wanderers who have been captured at the outer edges of the Milky Way and are slowly moving into increasingly denser territory as we spiral, too.

Eventually, all astronomers will accept the idea that we are going to slither into some mega-black hole and be crushed utterly. And after the six or seven black hole complexes suck in and compress everything, they will spiral into each other from all directions as creation reverses. Once they spin around each other, they will collapse into a new universe.

Good thing I won't see this. Another reason to not want to live forever. Shudder.

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Comments

[jsmith]

"Steinhardt and Turok's cyclic model of the Universe, it expands and contracts repeatedly over timescales that make the 13.7 billion years that have passed since the Big Bang seem a mere blink."

Where have I heard that tune before?

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521019265

[shirt]

You might want to read Paul Anderson's "Tau Zero" which speculates about this and is a fairly good read as well.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson---Poul Anderson!

He lived not far from me in California. We used to have such fun. He was a most wonderful, magical, amazing person. Get him drunk and pick up a sword and have a pas de deux.

Heh. He loved fighting and loved fighting fighting wenches dressed provocatively. Which was my specialty way back when it was a good thing (heh, no more).

I really miss him.

[jsmith]

We can speculate all we want, but until we get a better grip on a critical piece of data, anything in that area will remain... speculative.

What's missing is a value for the matter density of the universe. Greater than some critical value - everything collapses. Less - everything doesn't collapse. Currently, we just don't know.

"He loved fighting and loved fighting fighting wenches dressed provocatively. Which was my specialty way back when it was a good thing (heh, no more)."

What - dressing provocatively? C'mon, Elaine - I bet you've still got it!

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Our dear planet has been spared any horrors like this destruction because we are wanderers who have been captured at the outer edges of the Milky Way and are slowly moving into increasingly denser territory as we spiral, too.