User:Dbuschhorn

The Collapsing Universe

Hubble's law is a statement, in physical cosmology, which states that the redshift in light, coming from distant objects is directly proportional to their distance. Farther objects are moving away from us more rapidly than close ones so the light coming from those distant objects appears more red.

As a fast-moving object races away from an observer, it begins to appear slightly more red. The light waves get longer, between their peaks, the faster the object moves away. When an object moves toward an observer, it exhibits a blue shift as the light waves pile up against one another. This is similar to the “Doppler shift” which is heard as the change in sound as a car races toward you and then passes. You hear a higher pitched sound as it approaches and a lower tone as it passes.

The faster the celestial object moves toward you, the bluer the shift. The faster it moves away, the redder the shift.

Since 1998, there has been a mystery in the skies.

When viewed from Earth, all galaxies appear to be moving away from us. This indicates the universe is expanding, like a balloon. Except for our local group of galaxies, all have been seen to have, a distinct redshift, to their light spectrum, indicating that they are indeed moving away.

But more than that, in 1998, researchers determined that the universe is accelerating away from us. It has been hypothesized that there is some unknown force that is pushing galaxies apart. Since we can observe galaxies, like the Mice Galaxies, two spiral galaxies in the constellation Coma Berenices, in the midst of collision, this force seems unlikely.

The acceleration of distant galaxies can be explained using the largest intergalactic force, we know to exist.

Gravity.

If there is a black hole large enough, it will not only pull entire galaxies into it but will also cause all other galaxies to show a redshift, as they accelerate away from each other, into the singularity.

Imagine the sun was replaced with a black hole powerful enough to drag all the planets of our solar system into it. As we looked at Mercury, it would appear to be moving away from us and accelerating off, into the black hole.

As we looked at Venus… ditto.

Now, we turn around and look back at Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, etc..

They also appear to be moving away from us at an ever-increasing pace.

Is our solar system expanding or contracting? In this example, it's getting smaller, even though every planet is getting farther away from every other planet.

Our universe is getting smaller. It is not being squeezed, or shrinking like a balloon with a slow leak. It is draining into a black hole. Half of the galaxies we see are accelerating away from us and into an enormous, central singularity. We are accelerating away from the other half.

Prediction: If this hypothesis is true, there will be a thin sphere of galaxies that will have a blue shift. The galaxies that are in the sphere we inhabit. Those galaxies will not only have a blue shift, but will be on a collision course, with ours. The center of this sphere will be the black hole.

The singularity, at the center of all this must be unimaginably large (even to those who work, daily, with unimaginably large numbers and concepts). It must often be consuming entire galaxies.

Hubble’s redshift observation was the first evidence of the concept of a Big Bang. Even if the universe is not contracting, it is at least slowing enough to be detected, indicating that there will be a Big Crunch when it all unwinds.

There is no way of knowing precisely how distant the black hole is, nor how massive it may be. It is certain that it will take billions of years for our galaxy to be pulled into it, since if it is not detectable (by its absence of light and winking out galaxies), it is certainly more than the distance to the farthest galaxies, 12.88 billion light years away. In other words, really quite distant.

References 1. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law 2. Goldhaber, G. and Perlmutter, S, "A study of 42 type Ia supernovae and a resulting measurement of Omega(M) and Omega(Lambda)", Physics Reports-Review section of Physics Letters 307 (1-4): 325-331 Dec. 1998 3. Garnavich PM, Kirshner RP, Challis P, et al. "Constraints on cosmological models from Hubble Space Telescope observations of high-z supernovae" Astrophysical Journal 493 (2): L53+ Part 2 Feb. 1 1998