250 Million Years

Whilst I was out sick for a few weeks, I had chance to watch Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Well, not so much of a chance, but an obsession that ended with me spending a few hours on the road, visiting any place that might have it on DVD, only to find a copy at Fry's electronics in the computer component section (in with all of the chips, motherboards, etc). I was told by a salesclerk that it was sciency, so they put it there rather than with the rather large section of TV show DVDs that they have. 13 hours of Carl droning on and on can really put one to sleep. But during some of those fevered half-asleep hours, I stumbled across a few ideas that I wanted to post about - this is one of them.

Our galaxy is large (compared to the Earth, though small compared to other galaxies). It is 100,000 light years across and takes 250 Million years for our solar system to makes its way once around. Being that the Universe is a mere 14-ish billion years old, that means our solar system could have at most made 56 orbits around the galactic core. Actually, our solar system isn't that old, we are a third generation solar system (we are made from one that exploded which formed another than exploded which lead to ours forming). That is interesting in and of itself, but the first thing I thought was: that's impossible, 56 orbits around the galactic core!

See, planets, suns, etc, all stuff is space is supposed to be formed by these eddies, little pools of matter (basic particles) that after billions of years kind of just clumped together. These clumpings, formed by the swirls, clear out their orbit in order to get the matter needed to make suns. With a maximum of only 56 orbits from the time of the Big Bang until now, that doesn't leave a lot of rotations for swirling. Our space is very clear, which means a lot of clearing has gone on... but over only 56 orbits?

Take a cup of hot chocolate. There will be foam on the top, which can be used to represent the early universe. How many times does it have to swirl the liquid around the center before one will see the foam clump into small systems? Sure I am simplifying the problem way down, but I believe the principal is still accurate enough for my blog. It just seems that most arguments I've seen for the formation of stars imply that over billions of rotations, matter finally packs in close enough to form a star, not just a handful of rotations.

Therefore, based on this newest observation and some basic math, I'm going to say the Universe is actually one million times old than currently believed to be true. At least a million. I believe a few thousand years from now, people will discover this to be true, you can bet on it.

The Edward