Stellar encounters also make occasional fireworks, which are noteworthy because they're superimposed on such a cold and endless night. A pair of white dwarfs can collide or merge to make a supernova explosion if the combined mass exceeds the threshold for violent detonation.This time the math is: ember + ember = firework. An even rarer event sees a pair of neutron stars or a pair of black holes (or a neutron star and a black hole) colliding to emit an intense burst of high-energy radiation, the flash briefly outshining the rest of the universe. When these dense objects merge they also distort space-time and unleash a spasm of gravity waves.
The last fizz of stellar fusion is a slideshow in a circus completely run by gravity. In the era of stars, life was kept interesting by a battle of competing forces—radiation released from the creation of elements versus gravity. By 100 trillion years after the big bang, gravity may have lost some battles but it has won the war and has nobody left to play with but itself. Gravity playing solitaire turns out to be pretty interesting.
Been reading Chris Impey's How It Ends: From You to the Universe. The "you" part is only sporadically interesting, but speculating on how the galaxy and the universe will fizzle out holds a certain fascination. Call it a catastrophe or just the natural order of things, it's kind of galvanizing. Of course this isn't something any of us expect to see in our lifetimes.
Somehow perfect musical accompaniment by Joan as Police Woman playing the Reader's Digest version of David Bowie's song suite, and Bowie with the original.
2 comments:
I can see how this one may have caught and held your attention but its premise that gravity rules the universe is one I'm not convinced about despite its common acceptance. We don't know that there was a big bang or that the universe isn't a constant - eternal, in other words. I like to believe it is and that it and our conscious presence are an evolving whole. Perhaps, as the Buddhists state, nothing exists outside of consciousness.
I did enjoy the david Bowie version, but you knew I would, didn't you?
btw: David Crosby was book shopping that day.
Contemporary cosmology puts great emphasis on expansion and entropy. The redshift demonstrates that the universe is expanding in space, but there's a finite amount of matter, and when you factor in the energy being spent from the stars, there's effectively less stuff to this universe. Now am I convinced this is the ultimate truth? No, and this is something quite distant from our current lives anyway. But getting a handle on it in terms of "okay, what if it's like this" puts things in perspective.
That's David Bowie at his really weird and dark, and it's quite bewitching in those terms.
Crosby sightings are something else. He's a feisty old fellow.
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