Sunday, March 9, 2014

928 - Worlds Of Wonder VIII


The term stellar nursery seems to me to be an artefact of post-Hubble Star Trek television script writing.  The more common scientific term is a "molecular cloud".  Either way, the result is the same: charged molecules in deep space accrete.  If their density becomes critical, the cloud could form stars within, which is where we end up with the term "stellar nursery".

Our universe is in the second phase of stellar expansion. The first phase, brought about by the Big Bang, produced gigantic stars with  almost unimaginable levels of energy.  These early stars died or went nova, releasing their energy in vast molecular clouds that coalesced into second-stage stars, the ones we see in our own sky.  Eventually, "our" stars will break down and reform into new stellar configurations over and over again until the Universe runs out of energy for expansion, however long that takes.  Then, presumably, the whole thing might rubberband back into the Big Bang singularity and the whole process renews - a Cosmic Blink.  

The amount of energy, matter, and time required to perform one Cosmic Blink seems to be just a hair on the finite side of infinite.  It's more than we can imagine, especially when compared to any one person, take me and JSVB for example.  And who knows how many Cosmic Blinks there have been?  Are they all the same, implying a rigidly deterministic Universe, or is each Cosmic Blink different, which would allow for perhaps infinite orders of chaotic and ordered Universes?

I look forward to the Cosmic Blink that generates the Universe where people feel compelled to buy more art from me.