Sandra Rodriguez
TheNew York CityCollegeof Technology
Astronomy II: Stars
PHYS 1118-3450
December 3, 2012
During the last century our society has evolved so far beyond imaginable. Information that we once knew is being revised and thrown out the window. Our history is being re-written as we speak now. Think back to your science class, when everything in the world was thought to be made out of atoms. With the advancement in technology we found this to be false and unfortunately, year’s worth of research and text book has gone down the drain. Where am I going with this you may ask? Well our ideas of what we knew and understood about the world are being changed with new questions and theories being raised. One theory that is being question or revised is the idea that explains how our Universe was created. This theory does not explain why it happened it just gives you an idea of how it came to be. The purpose of this paper is to look at the origin of our Universe, different discoveries, and new theories that if tested to be true might change our lives forever.
The Universe is believed to be billions of billions of billions of light years in diameter and consist of matter, energy, including our Earth, planets, stars, galaxies, and other contents of interstellar space. The Universe is so vast that it is even harder to imagine, if it were possible to step out of it, what it would look like. It is believed that the Universe was created about 14 billion years ago during the Big Bang. There are new theories taking into account that there might be other universes like ours and that we may not be alone. Some scientists choose to discard this idea due to the inability to prove this hypothesis. Unfortunately there is no proof and to obtain it would be an impossible task because traveling as fast as light or even faster is still unattainable. Moreover, leaving Earth is a very complicated and dangerous task due to the risk of mechanical malfunctions and the lack of supplies that can be taken to sustain life.
On July of 1969, Neil Armstrong made history by being the first man to walk on the Moon. This event was one of mankind’s greatest achievements and it is still a small fraction to what still needs to be done. The distance of Earth to the Moon is incomparable to the distance of our Earth to the outskirts of the Milky Way. The only surface so far humans have been able to reach is the Moon. So imagine the complexity it would be to travel beyond our Moon and how unthinkable it would be to travel beyond our Solar System, then getting out the Milky Way, pass trillions of galaxies, and then hopefully getting out of our Universe to see a vast of other universes. Now wouldn’t this be great and exciting? Furthermore, to complicate the situation there is evidence that the Universe is expanding rapidly. So what does this mean? I will further explain this expansion later on and the impact it could have on the whole world and humanity.   When talking about the Universe we reach topics that can be mind blowing. One topic is, where did the universe come from? If everything has a beginning then what happen during that billionth of a second or even before our Universe was created. Scientist came up with the Big Bang theory that was first proposed by George Lemaitre in his “hypothesis of the primeval atom.” The Big Bang theory suggests that our Universe originated from an infinitesimally small point called a singularity, proposed by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. A singularity is contemplated to be a region in space where the density of matter became infinite and the laws of physics ceased to exist. It is theorized that these singularity exist within the center of a black hole. A very interesting article I read called “There may be no singularity!” by Richard Okelberry, talks about two reasons why a singularity may not exist in his opinion. I recommend anyone interested in singularity to read it.
Resuming to the discussion of the origin of our Universe, from out of nowhere a fireball smaller then the size of an atom appeared. It was 10 trillion times hotter than the core of the Sun. Everything that we know today was produced from this tiny burning particle. Here begins time and the expansion of our Universe. The idea that our Universe had a beginning was confirmed by Edwin Hubble who studied the wavelength of galaxies. He noticed that all the galaxies were moving away producing a red-shift, meaning that at a specific point in time everything was compacted at one point in space.
In order to study this point in time scientist created a new form of time called Planck time, which looks at 10^-43 of a second. At this time it was presumed that the universe roused from a singularity and that all the four fundamental forces of nature (Gravity, Electromagnetism, Nuclear Strong and Weak forces) was one joint super force and not yet divided. As the tiny fire ball takes one further step in Planck time it begins to inflate rapidly as it began to cool. This expansion is known as Inflation. While the Universe inflated and cooled it caused the super forces to split.
In addition during the beginning, the Universe was made up of pure energy, so scientists did not understand how planets, stars, and galaxies formed. Where did all the matter come from to produce everything in intergalactic space? This was not known until 1905, when Albert Einstein came up with the famous equation E=MC2. This equation showed that energy could be converted into matter and both are the same thing in a different form. Scientists were able to use this equation to rip apart matter to produce an enormous amount of energy. This is the result of an atomic bomb. The reciprocal happened during the Big Bang. The enormous amount of energy converted itself into matter, which would eventually clump together to form atoms and with the help of the four fundamental forces it would create the Universe we know today. But it would take billions of years to be produce. The Universe still needed to cool enough to slow down the movement of protons, neutrons, and electrons to combine. Stars needed to be formed and die so that their supernova would create new elements. This process is called nucleosynthesis. Moreover, a battle between matter and anti-matter would seal our fate. If matter would have been completely wiped out by its counter partner, well I wouldn’t be writing this paper right now. The world would actually have been nothing but radiation. Somehow matter was able to win the battle and the little amount that was left over from the war was the product of everything we see today, including the existence of humanity. Some scientists believe that this battle was won because there was an unbalance within matter.
It was not until the 1960’s that we were able to paint an image of the birth of our Universe. This discovery was accidentally made by Arnold Penzias and his colleague Robert Wilson. They were measuring radio waves from clouds of gas in the Milky Way, but kept getting interference from every direction. This interference sounded like a television un-tuned to a channel. Along with other scientists, they discovered that the sound was the shock wave of when our Universe was created and we were receiving these signals in radio wave. So if we could see radio wave with our eyes, every night we would be able to see an image of our Universe about 14 billion years ago.
The reason we were able to see this is because every time we look into space we are actually looking at the past. For instance, light that travels from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach us, therefore, if our Sun were to magically turn off we would not know, but until eight minutes later. Another example would be the nearest stars that we see at night. Let’s assume that theses stars are about 15 to 30 light years away, we are actually seeing how the stars look like 15 to 30 years ago. The same thing goes for our Universes’ creation. The remnant that we see is how the Universe appeared at the moment of creation, but not before.
The Big Bang is just a theory that gives us an idea of what happened during the 10^-43 of a second. However it does not tell us what caused everything to launch outward in the first place. What power could have driven a small tiny molecule to blow up to the size of our galaxy in less than a blink of an eye? Alan Guth’s discovery leads to a new theory. In which could explain what made the Big Bang burst out. Furthermore, this discovery would be the foundation of the idea of there being a Multi-verse would be built upon. Alan Guth found that gravity can work in reverse. After this short outward burst, the Universe would expand slowly and cool off creating galaxies just like the Big Bang theory suggests. This short outburst Guth called it Inflation. This theory was perfect because it could actually be tested through observation and the evidence could be found in the night sky.
The theory predicted that Inflation would have left an imprint on the cosmic background radiation and would show regions of different temperature. In 1989, NASA launched the COBE into outer space and then in 2001 the WMAP. The results were shocking. The data received were an almost identical to what the math of inflation had predicted. This was just another small step to understanding the origin of our Universe, but it did explain why the Universe is the way it is.
Alex Vilenkin found a shocking secret that the inflation theory held. Vilenkin began to ponder what would happen when inflation ended and how would a region of space transition out of inflation? In his theory, he explains that inflation does not end everywhere at once and that it is still happening in different regions of space. Additionally, he proposed that the Big Bang was not a unique event because there had been countless other bangs and possibly even before ours. This became known as internal inflation. Many scientists disregarded his theory because it was one that could not be proven. The Universe is expanding quickly, thus light from distant galaxies will never reach us. So if light from distant galaxies cannot reach us it would be presumed that light from other universe would not reach us neither. The theory of there being a Multi-verse would have been terminated there, if internal inflation was the only theory that point to it, but that was not the case.
Two unrelated area of studies revived the idea once more. One is the String theory, which was devised to explain how the Universe works in the smallest scales. The other looked at bigger scales and found something odd. Astronomers knew that the Universe was expanding and expected it to eventually slow down due to the gravitational pull of stars and galaxies, but they were wrong. In fact the Universe was accelerating and expanding rapidly. This acceleration could have two different impacts to our Universe depending if our Universe is infinite or finite. If our Universe is infinite then we will continue to expand and freeze to death. In a finite Universe it would collapse on itself ending in fire. This sounds a bit scary to imagine that our existence may have been doomed from the beginning. Astronomers came to the conclusion that some type of energy must be pushing galaxies further apart causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. This energy is known as dark energy because we cannot see it. The strength of this energy and the particular amount that exist in our universe puzzled many scientists because there was a mix-match in the number obtained. The amount that was obtain was actually very small it is 1^-122.
In the video “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Universe or Multi-verse,” Brian Green talks about that if there was indeed a Multi-verse, that this number would actually make sense. What I understood from his analogy was that if there were many universes then having that amount of dark energy would not be surprising. For instance, just like in his analogy of going to a hotel and obtaining a room key that says 1000001. This number would not be so shocking, if the hotel contained millions of rooms. He also claimed that if you were to take a couple of zeros away that our Universe would not have had that chance to create galaxies because everything would have expanded too quickly. In the other hand, if you added some zeros the Universe might have collapse on its own. Moreover, he hypothesized that there might even be multiple copies of our Universe. To understand this, picture the lottery. The possibility that you will get the exact matching number is 1 out 175,711,535, that is a very low chance and still you find two or more people getting the exact numbers. So why shouldn’t this occur in a Multi-verse where there is a possibility that another universe won the lottery just like our Universe did?
Another theory that supported this idea is String Theory. String theory is intention to explain how the Universe works in small scales. The theory breaks matter into molecules, molecules to atoms, atoms can be broken into protons, neutron, and electrons, these particles can be further broken down into quarks and eventually arrive to loops or strings of energy. These string particles would form different elements depending on how they vibrate. One thing that scientist did not like about this theory was that it challenged common sense. It actually added extra dimensions and that height, width, and lengths were not the only spatial. This opened doors to many possibilities. These strings would take many shapes and forms and be somewhat like the DNA of the universe however, there were too many possibilities. Some scientist got 10^500 possible shapes and believed that this was a dead end. Others believe that this was just what they needed a large number that supported the idea of there being a Multi-verse.
The theories mention in this paper are just a small amount to what is actually out there and some of us choose to accept these theories because we have not arrived to a theory which can give us an exact answer. Nonetheless, when you have three theories pointing in one direction what more proof do you really need? So if we discover these theories to be true about a Multi-verse how would this affect your life, I don’t know beats me. But I will say that learning more about where we live can give us an idea of what to expect in the future. It might even give us a breakthrough in medicine, advancement in technology, or it can even help us escape the faith that awaits us in 5 billion years. More research can give us an answer to what dark matter and dark energy is and what major roles it played or plays in our Universe. As a result of this unknown energy our Universe is expanding faster than ever imagined and uncovering the truth about it might give us a prediction of our fate or even our purpose.
In conclusion, I believe that there might be the possibility of there being a Multi-verse beyond our Universe. What makes us so special to consider our self at the center of all? From what I learn so far is that we were never in the center of the Solar System , nor the Milky Way, and I would presumed nor in the Universe. I know that there are many things that we do not understand and might never come to understand, but why end the trip to enlightenment, look how far we have come in the last century. One thing that puzzles me from Einstein’s equation is that many calculations resulted with an answer of “infinity.” So what if our world is infinite and if it were like standing in between two mirrors that showed an infinite amount of us. Just because the image gets smaller and you cannot see it doesn’t mean is not there. Imagine how an atom would feel if it had feeling, to know that it is so small and will never be able to step out of its own universe to see ours and this could be the same for us. Hey you never know.
