And, for that matter, what occupied The Creator before the “Big Bang’s” beginning? Mother Nature a.k.a The Creator (okay, God) cannot exist in a vacuum. Astro-physicists refer to this predictable albeit distant event as “Heat Death.” This poses the question of what will occupy The Creator once His/Its creation is inert. It is a demonstrable fact that our universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate and will continue to do so until all the stars in all the galaxies exhaust their fusible material and all the lights go out. So there really will be an Armageddon, albeit Homo sapiens are not likely to be around to suffer the consequences considering how we are currently damaging our planet’s life-support systems. For among other reasons, in something like 3 billion years hence, our sun’s fires will begin to cool turning it into a swollen red giant that will envelope four of its orbiting planets, including ours.
And I’m quite sure It didn’t put on this display just to entertain us. Whatever is out there in the cosmos, it owes its existence to the same First Cause that created us.
Think of the possibilities that will come and go in all those billions of future years. So Creation as we know it is in its infancy. You can’t get much lonelier than that!Īlso, be reminded our universe (yes, it may be there are an infinite number of parallel universes!) will be around for more than 100 billion more years (see below). The idea of being the lone intelligent creature in such vastness doesn’t make me feel special. I don’t know about you, but I welcome fellow travelers. MORE COOMBS: Read other columns by Samm Coombs So it is mathematically unlikely we are alone. In that time, isn’t it likely intelligent life has come and gone within the billions of galaxies each with their billions of stars containing gazillions of planets millions of which no doubt support life as we know it, much less life as we don’t know it. Ergo, the universe was around some 8 billion years before our solar system formed (and 13,600,850,000 years before Homo sapiens trod this planet!). Our universe is 13.7 billion years old, while Mother Earth was formed a mere 5 billion years ago. "The old stars have moved so they look like they bulge out of the main plane of the Milky Way, while the younger stars form a much thinner band in the plane.Let’s take a break from Donald Trump’s shenanigans and Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and consider our place in the cosmos, past, present and future. "When we look at, we are looking at two populations of stars, one much older than the other," said Buder. The cataclysmic collisions that some billions of years ago mixed up the fledgling Milky Way with other galaxies may have pushed stars around in a way that we can still see today.Īstronomers know that in the band of the Milky Way, which is visible in the night sky from Earth, older stars are separated from younger ones, but they have not yet figured out why. The astronomers believe that understanding the origins of stellar populations in the Milky Way may help solve further mysteries of the galaxy's structure and composition. Stars that originated in the Milky Way appear greener, the scientists said in the statement, while those from outside glow in yellower shades. "By 'scanning' these stellar barcodes, we measured how abundant 30 elements, such as sodium, iron, magnesium, and manganese, were, and how they appeared in different concentrations depending on where the star was born," Buder said in the statement. By studying these colorful spectra, scientists can see the differing chemical compositions of the observed stars. Buder and his collaborators used the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), a 13-foot (3.9-meter) optical telescope at the Australian Astronomical Observatory in Sydney, to split the light of those stars into a spectrum of individual colors.