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October 31, 2013

Man's View Of A God-Sized Universe


Over to Kid's site there is a video that shows how are tax dollars are are spent in a way that actually produces something, knowledge of the Universe - God's Creation. This is the Hubble Telescope view of the Ultra Deep Field, a section of sky the size of a grain of sand that to the naked eye has nothing in it, but actually contains over 10,000 galaxies, each galaxy containing over 100 billion stars.



Now within that video (at approx. the 2:25 mark) there is a link to another video that explains how it is possible that some galaxies are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. That video is here.




There are three different measurements in the red shift of light emitted by moving galaxies:
  • Doppler Redshift results from the relative motion of the light emitting object and the observer. If the source of light is moving away from you then the wavelength of the light is stretched out, i.e., the light is shifted towards the red. These effects, individually called the blueshift, and the redshift are together known as doppler shifts.
  • Cosmological Redshift: a redshift caused by the expansion of space. The wavelength of light increases as it traverses the expanding universe between its point of emission and its point of detection by the same amount that space has expanded during the crossing time.
  • Gravitational Redshift: a shift in the frequency of a photon to lower energy as it climbs out of a gravitational field. (cosmological, gravitational and dopplar)
Scientists estimate that the Universe is 13 to 14 billion years old, that is, since the Big Bang began everything and which is also responsible for the cosmological red shift.

At the same time, scientists tell us that the size of the observable universe - that part of the Universe that our most powerful instruments can measure - is about 45 billion light years.

The Big Bang Theory speculates that the space/time continuum started as an Initial Singularity, a single point of zero volume but containing incredible mass, that started to expand. If so, the expansion of the universe has to be at a rate at least three times the speed of light to account for the current observable Universe. And this expansion rate is increasing...
74.3 plus or minus 2.1 kilometers (46.2 plus or minus 1.3 miles) per second per megaparsec (a megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years).
And why is the Universe expanding at an accelerated rate? Because of something called "dark energy."

And what is dark energy? It is something invented by humans who must name things they do not understand. But this is not a bad thing! To paraphrase Dean Wormer, "Fearful, ignorant and superstitious is no way to go through life, son."

Ever so slowly and at great cost do we pry apart God's Creation. As the Ultra Deep Astrological Field shows us, there is a lot more out there than we can imagine.

Piece by piece, we pick at a puzzle created by a God of infinite intelligence and infinite ability. As Isaiah 55:8-9 tells us

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts."

6 comments:

Kid said...

Thanks for the mention. Some randoms.

The singularities are freaky. Untold mass contained in infinite smallness in each black hole, and almost every galaxy contains at least one at its center.

The known laws of physics do not apply once you pass the event horizon of a black hole.

Carl Sagan theorized that the universe extends to infinity in both directions. In crude terms, solar systems as atoms, atoms as solar systems.

Just millionths of a second after the big bang, most of the universe was formed. If different laws of physics exist at a black hole, imagine what's going on during a big bang.

The universe could have been created in "6 days". Let there be light. And there was the light of trillions of stars.

Beautiful isn't it?

We know more than they did 1000 years ago, but I'd say we are still Sgt Shultz.

Undergroundpewster said...

Psalm 19

Woodsterman (Odie) said...

Cool stuff.

sig94 said...

Kid - the more you dig into the science of origins, the freakier it gets. You are actually getting into God's way of doing things.

sig94 said...

Pewster - that link isn't working. Here:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+19&version=NIV

sig94 said...

Odie - I wish I was better at math. I was a physics major for a while in college and this stuff always amazed me.