Musings on Gravity and Galaxies
- The Center of Gravity in a system of objects can be caused by one massive object in the center like the Sun & Planets where the central object is so relatively massive as to make the gravitational pull between the other objects relatively negligible. Does the math really play out for the vast distances in our solar system or is there another explanation for the cohesion of the system such as inertia of the original planar spin?
- There also can be no matter in the center of gravity but it’s the gravitational center of similarly sized objects (like a binary star) revolving around each other.
- I suggest that when the first few bodies of a multi-body system (all of whom have similar masses) start to interact, the center of gravity shifts a greater amount than when many more bodies join the dance. This is similar to when you take the average of many measurements. At first the average can take surprising turns but then as the sample size grows, the average varies less and less with each new entry (provided the standard deviation is not outrageous).
- Given that it appears that most celestial systems swirl in a plane or disc rather than a sphere, why is that? Why swirl at all? Swirling is probably due to the gravitational pull of objects on each other but why a disc rather than a sphere? Is there a “critical mass” past which the sphere cannot hold and it flattens into disc shape?
- Is the shape of a galaxy indicative of its evolutionary stage, for example: irregular blob to bar-shaped disc to spiral-arm disc? Or is it the other way around? Or are there 5 stages instead of 3 (blob-bar-spiral-bar-blob)?
- Is gas & dust the same thing as “dark matter”? After all if no starlight is there to illuminate it, one would expect it to be dark.
- In the “big bang” worldview it seems so present time-centric or egotistic to believe that every galaxy is only in its first generation of being. My theory is that there very well could and probably have been many generations of stars born and died in older galaxies (see the nearby blob-bar-spiral-bar-blob galactic evolutionary/aging corollary) thereby making the Universe much older than the 14 billion years we limit it at in most cosmological conversations.
- If we accept that the average star life is 10 billion years, which I do, 14 billion years puts us partway into but not fully through the second generation of a non-neophyte galaxy. If we’re through more than one full generation, why can’t we be through 7 or 38?
- And then the bigger age issue if you believe in the big bang expansion of matter from some central point (even though the geometry of the observable universe yields no such point) is that perhaps there have already been many in a series of such universal expansion and contraction cycles.
