Second Question of Stellar Geography
Second question, as nuanced before (Part 1): The "edge" of the universe appears to be about 47 billion light years away in all directions. (Back ground. Light that is being emitted from a moving object is affected by the direction the object is moving. According to Einstein, the speed never changes, but the "lines" of the colors move. Objects going away from the viewer show a "red shift" as the light is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. The amount of "shift" can be correlated with the distance that the object is from the observer. The farther away they are, the more shift is measured. As mentioned before, astronomers can estimate the distance to stars by their red shift. This is called Hubble's Law.)
That brings up our second question. Why is the red shift equal in all directions as we observe it from earth? Since the red shift can be correlated to the distance a body is away from us, wouldn't we, here on earth, expect to see a majority of "large" red shifts in the direction that is farther from the earth? If it is evenly distributed, then does that mean that the earth or at least our galaxy is at or near the center of the universe? I thought we were in an outer rim.
The uniformity of the red shift in all directions seems to indicate that the edge of the universe is equidistant from us, regardless of how we turn. If we use a merry-go-round to illustrate, sitting on one of the rearing horses will find you closer to some other "animals" than others. The only place that you are equally far all of them is when you are in the center of the ride. (We will stick to two dimensional space for now. But that does bring up another consideration. Is the universe equally dispersed in three dimensional space? If not, why not? Remember the "big bang?" It was an explosion. I will ignore that for now.)
So how can we explain the seeming centrality of the earth in the universe? Seems to be a logical conundrum.
Finally how can the planets be so heterogenous. The inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are rocky. The next ones out, Jupiter and Saturn are gaseous. Finally the outer planets, Neptune, Uranus, and (maybe a planet?) Pluto are icy. (You can decide whether you want Pluto as a planet or not. And now some guys are predicting another planet out past Pluto that is ten times as large as the earth.) No evidence, of course, just a guess.
Notice the segregation of "building materials." They could not have been "thrown out" of the sun, so must have been somehow included in the "solar system package" that was somehow assembled during or just after the "hyper inflation." (See Part 1) Ironically, the sun is also gaseous, so the "layers" in the solar system are gas, rock, gas, ice. It is possible that the ice of the outer planets is frozen gas, but scientists are claiming to find water there too.
Is it just happenstance that the different layers of planets are grouped as they are? Some (naive?) commentaries explain that the heat of the sun did not melt the rocky materials so they were able to remain close to the sun while the gases were driven farther out. ...and on and on. But there is still no explanation as to how the rocky material conglomerated "close" to the sun in the first place. The asteroid belt, also seems to be rocky. Then come the gaseous planets, followed by the icy (frozen gas) planets. Pluto is included in the Kuiper belt of icy stuff, surrounded by the unseen and undetected Oort cloud.
The rocky material is largely grouped in the inner portion of the solar system, but there are some rocky moons out in the gas giants and Saturn's rings are largely dust, chunks, and some "ice." The explanation of "moon" formation is typically a collision by some outside body that split off the moon. But the gas planets could not have produced rocky moons. And Pluto and it's moon were recently reported to be quite different.
This solar system isn't nice to the "spontaneous formation" branch of solar system explanations. The more we learn, the more questions are produced. And we are not even considering the moons that orbit backwards around a couple of planets.(The term is retrograde. I love that kind of talk.)
It almost seems that a "special creation" was employed to frustrate our speculation. Just a thought.
Wednesday, April 19, 2017 Stellar Geography (Part 1) http://reflectionsfromjim.blogspot.com/2017/04/stellar-geography-part-1.html
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