'Tis such a long way to the star
Rising above our shore
It took its light to come so
far
Thousands of years and more.
It may have long died on its way
Into the distant blue
And only now appears its ray
To shine for us as true.
We see its icon slowly rise
And climb the canopy;
It lived when still unknown to
eyes,
We see what ceased to be.
. . . . . . . . .
Mihail Eminescu, 1850-1889,
Romanian poet
The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at
least in the thousands or millions and perhaps in the hundreds of
thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars
more or less comparable to that of our own Galaxy. So if you
multiply out how many stars that means, it is some number - let's
see, ten to the . . . It's come thing like one followed by a
twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is only one is but one.
It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe. And this
vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my
view has been taken into account, even superficially. (Carl
Sagan)
If we assume that our universe has an infinite number of stars
and that they are evenly distributed, then the aggregate of many
stars shine you should not depend on the distance and the night sky
would be black, but bright. Like in any direction we look, the sky
should appear just as bright as when we look at the Milky Way
Galaxy. In addition, because each line of sight would end on the
surface of a star, being so many, every point in the sky would be
even brighter than the surface of a star. This problem is Olbers's
paradox.
It seems that Olbers was not the first to note this fact
inexplicable paradox known as the black night sky. Kepler still put
into question in 1610. Then were Halley, Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers in
1823, and Kelvin in 1901.
A thorough understanding of the phenomenon is due to
unexpectedly novelist Edgar Allan Poe has long been interested in
astronomy.
At first, one could believe that it can solve Olbers's paradox
of assuming the stars light absorbed by interstellar dust clouds.
At first, in 1823, Olbers assumption was the same. He said, also,
life could not develop in the presence of a glow so great, if all
the stars would have sent their light on earth, an inconceivable
brightness higher than the Sun. The light from the Milky Way galaxy
reduced also, by clouds of dust, in the way to us. If we look
towards the Sagittarius constellation, Milky Way galaxy center in
the sky, we see dark patches instead of seeing a flaming sphere. In
this place Milky Way, have to appear brightest.
It also talked of another reason, because light intensity
decreases with the square of the distance to stars. This thing
actually canceled, because the stars number also increases with the
square of the distance.
The universe is very old and then the light from more distant
stars has not yet had enough time to get to us. In addition,
although Poe cleared the paradox since the mid-nineteenth century,
our schools still give wrong explanations.
Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of
the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed
by the Galaxy - since there could be absolutely no point, in
all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only
mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could
comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable
directions, would be by supposing that the distance of the
invisible background [is] so immense that no ray from it has yet
been able to reach us at all. (Poe cited by Michio Kaku)
Kelvin noted that, when we look to the sky, we see the past.
Although the speed of light is so great, 300 000 km / sec, but
steady, distant starlight cannot reach us. Kelvin calculated that
for the night sky is bright, the universe would have to expand to
hundreds of trillions of light years. The universe is not so old.
Universe has only just 13.7 billion years, so the sky is still
black. The lifetime star one measures in several billion years. Our
sun has already run through five billion years. The life feature of
a yellow star is 10 billion years. Bigger stars, blue and white,
live longer, than they consume their nuclear energy more quickly.
Smaller stars, red dwarfs, for examples, living relatively
more.
In 2004, Hubble Telescope made the first picture of one of the
most distant points in the universe. To accomplish such a task, the
chosen point, near Orion constellation, registered by the 'image
compensation', a photograph taken with an exposure time of several
hundred hours. It was a perfect alignment of the telescope, over
four hundred turns of artificial satellite to wear it. Difficulties
perpetuated over a period of more than four months of work. In
practice, the telescope and related digital equipment,
photographically recorded a black dot, repeatedly, keeping the
direction and then overlapping images to get a longer exposure
necessary to highlight the phenomenon. In addition, the image
compensation method ensures good resolution by reducing unnecessary
brightness fund. At this recording was used a modern digital
receiver, NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object
Spectrometer).
One had obtained a photo with ten thousands of galaxies, in an
early development stage of the universe, chaotic one, after the Big
Bang. Among them were very red objects, such as dusty red galaxies,
quasars, and cool white dwarf stars. 'As if we see the end of the
beginning', said one of experiment organizers.
One found that photographs exposure showed several galaxies
whose light took 13 billion years to reach the Earth. Moreover, let
us not forget that the very age of the universe is 13.7 billion
years. Therefore, these galaxies formed almost half a billion a
year from Bing Bang. That means Hubble Telescope allowed us 'to
see' Big Bang itself.
Image compensation method used in astrophysics currently. In
this case, however, method was used on the Hubble Telescope, which
get very good images usually, being free from atmospheric effects.
Good quality images obtained using image compensation before also,
when one photographed many rings of Saturn, the so-called Cassini
division, by Voyager spacecraft. Image compensation used, in fact,
by Earth telescopes routinely, in stellar spectroscopy work.
And so it is when yearning
love
Dies into the deepest
night:
Extinct its flame, still glows
above
And haunts us with its
light.
Science has led us to the gates of the universe. However, our
conception of our surroundings remains disproportionate to that of
a child still immature. We became spiritually and culturally
paralyzed, unable to cope with cosmos vastness, to free us from our
position and central claimed to find real place that it occupies in
the nature structure. We destroyed this planet as if we have
another place to go. The fact that we are able to deal with science
is a glimmer of mental health-giving hope.
The Sun - 108 times larger in
diameter than Earth - is currently in full activity
Some 5 or 6, or 7 billion years from now, the Sun will
become a red giant star and will engulf the orbits of Mercury and
Venus and probably the Earth. The Earth then would be inside the
Sun, and some of the problems that face us on this particular day
will appear, by comparison, modest. On the other hand, since it is
5,000 or more million years away, it is not our most pressing
problem. (Carl Sagan)
In the future, the Sun will become a
red giant - a giant star that will surpass in size the diameter of
Earth's orbit, i.e. 200 times the diameter of the sun.
If it comes, about the age of the universe, a question arises:
What is beyond the most distant galaxies? When studying a picture
as that recorded by the Hubble Telescope we find a remarkable fact,
darkness's only between the galaxies. This is actually measured
microwave background radiation. That means the darkness is not in
the microwaves measurements. If our eyes could receive this
microwaves radiation also, we could see the Big Bang itself
flooding the night
sky.
I do not want to do literature
I will do not simulate more to see the
cosmos.
May be I will live 30 years
and then I will agonize and die,
and I will do not be an astral body in
another world.
- I'm so
sad, Mircea Cărtărescu -
(It is my attempt completely reckless
to translate from Cărtărescu)
However, we have to be optimistic. Even if we do not live as
stars, we have brothers with whom we praise. In addition, Carl
Sagan wanted us to see ourselves . . . made of atoms forged in the
fiery hearts of distant stars. To him we were "star stuff pondering
the stars; organized of 10 bilion billion billion atoms considering
the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at
least, consciousness arose."
REFERENCES:
Mihail Eminescu, To the star, Translation of Constantin
Noica,
http://noradamian.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/constantin-noica-eminescu-sau-ganduri-despre-omul-deplin-al-culturii-romanesti/,
(Accessed September 5, 2011);
Carl Sagan, THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE, Edited by
Ann Druyan, The Penguin Press New York, 2006;
Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds. A journey through creation, higher
dimensions, and the future of the cosmos, ANCHOR BOOKS, A Division
of Random House, Inc., New York, 2005;
Mircea Cărtărescu, Nothing, Humanitas, 2010.