What lies beyond the farthest star?

a reply to: SLAYER69

Even within our own universe there seems to be a froth like structure

a reply to: SLAYER69

Well, then just push it back. Once you get past all the bubbles, what's there?

a reply to: Aleister


On that scale then it becomes a comparison with the smallest things known to man. What do they all combine to become En masse?

The cycle repeats?

a reply to: SLAYER69

I suppose that what seems to be emptiness, when you scale it up large enough could conceivably be part of some ungodly large structure. I did hear one theory recently that if you travelled far enough through the void, eventually you might bump into another universe, and in the span of infinity, eventually you might just bump into another you who was travelling to see what lies beyond. Of course the time required for this to happen would be in the trillions of years. FREAKY!

a reply to: openminded2011

Assuming you could get out as far as the edge of the observable universe, I would guess you would just see the bit we cannot see from Earth. That said, if what you mean is going out past the edge of the ACTUAL universe, I very much doubt that it would be possible to merely cross a divide, and then be outside of the universe. You see, the universe is more than the stars, and the dust, and the radiation that are within in.

The universe is the area which is governed by the fundamental laws of physics which we learn more of every day of course, and which make our very existence possible. Without them, the existence of atoms, let alone human beings would be quite impossible. I suggest that either, beyond the edge of the observable universe there is more universe that we merely have no ability to conceive of, because it is all too far away for light from there to have reached us yet, or that there literally is no beyond the edge, that outside the universe, there is nothing, because nothing is possible outside the physical universe, or at least nothing by our standards.

I could be wrong, on both counts, but I do not think that reaching the edge would allow a person to travel beyond it. Not intact at any rate. Mind you, that edge would be moving away from you at one HELL of a rate, depending on which theory you like the best as to whether or not universal expansion has or has not slowed or stopped. I have heard all manner of whacky ideas in that regard over the last couple of years!

a reply to: TrueBrit

I had a profound thought the other night while watching this youtube video. It shows a gun fired under water at super high FPS



The part that got me thinking was the close up of one of the "bubbles" that are created. The pressure from the bullet causes the water to separate and since there is no Air, it is essentially a vacuum. This "bubble" expands under the force of the bullet until the outside pressure becomes too much, then it implodes under the weight of the water. The bubble shrinks down to a single point then explodes again with the force of all that pressure in a single point, just not as far as the first time. This continues, back and forth, with less power each time until it stabilizes.

What if our universe is going through this same process. It would explain why the universe appears to be expanding. If this is the case, the expansion of the universe will reach a critical point where it can no longer expand any further, causing it to contract for a time until there is a singularity again. Rinse and repeat. This ties in to the big bang theory quite nicely if you ask me.

To take it a step further, if this is in fact what the universe is experiencing, there would be a "wall" of sorts once you get far enough away from the center of the universe. While the analogy has water at the barrier of the bubble, I would expect to find something more along the lines of immense pressure of some sort, possibly extremely dense dark matter, or some other yet undiscovered matter or force.

Anyways, this is just the unscientific rambling of a dude who had a thought. I am in no way a scientist and make no claims that this is what is going on.

DC

a reply to: openminded2011

If you are there, then there is detectable matter.

I have a notion that in spaces where there is no matter, there is no flow of time. Time is infinite potential as yet unrealized. Space, being "spacetime" is the same. Without matter, it just does not really exist beyond being potential.

I have also wondered what affect the various densities of matter between us and another star has on the light reaching us. Light that traverses intergalactic space should, in theory, travel at a different speed due to a lack of time dilation. If the massless photon is the only thing there, what does that do to the speed at which it is traversing this empty space, relative to our observation?

cool! OP.

i've thought about that for a long time.

i have no idea about the actual reality of what is there.

but what if we got there and regretted it? lol! like hitting a wall or something we didn't want to see or shouldn't have seen.

and if we had the tech to get as far as the last star, we'd have a super duper odometer anyway.

i figured we might pick up speed heading to the edge of the universe. like getting caught in the draft? that cyclists and car racers use, saves on gas, lol! (as space expands)

maybe it's impossible to even get there, no matter what we have.
the thing is, if the universe expanded from the singularity, faster than light, we don't know how much faster so can't figure out how far ahead the edge is.

and there has to be one if things went according to the big bang. right?

back in the day, things like the op could really trip me out, big time. i've been a huge sci-fi fan since i could read.

wasn't there an old star trek where they were flung out of the universe?

I'm no scientist but I feel Like op is right in the absence of space time past the point of detectable light. But to reach it you would have to travel way faster than the speed of light which is probably impossible. One of those natural constraints like the grandfather paradox in time travel.

What lies beyond the furthest star is the same as what lies within the smallest particle. It is he same as what lies between you and every other person, between your inner mind and your finger tips...or what lies within the two points in time, one for which life did not exist, and the other where life is born.

What lies out there?
Questions that we're all here to continue investigating, believing, hypothesizing, and attempting to answer...but for which the only answer is to wait and find out...or not. It's a hell of a Rubik's cube trying to find out that which can never be known until it is known, or unknown. Of course, since the latter is an impossibility, the answer is, Yes...whatever you believe is out there is precisely what is out there.

a reply to: openminded2011

I think that space is far larger than we can possible fathom at this point and that the only reason we can perceive any sort of end to it from where we are is because the universe hasn't been around long enough for the light to travel to us from any distance farther than the amount of years the universe has been in existence calculated as a distance of light years from the objects. There was a long period of simple expansion before anything began to form that produced light and we have only been able to look even remotely close to that far out for the past ten or so years.

It is safe to say that unless you could create something similar to an Alcubierre drive that compresses space and time to create instantaneous travel, using an FTL drive would never get you going fast enough to catch up to the edge of the universe to discover what is there in the first place. My theory on it is that there are multiple "universes" which were spawned from multiple simultaneous big bangs an unfathomable distance apart so there would be no overlap and the molecules in them followed a similar progression which would bring us to this moment in time.

Some would be as simple as being a universe in which the other half of a 50/50 decision was taken by all of its inhabitants while others could be different to the point that humanity spawned in another place in the galaxy and farther back in galactic history than we did.

Interesting thought experiment OP. S&F

Fun topic for me to get in a comment before I've seen my ideas already posted... (as long as too much time didn't pass without me refreshing or posting) I don't believe any of this, because I don't see how it realistically pertains to me, other than at the point of "passing on," hopefully I get a chance to traverse the whole of it, but here's my impromptu thoughts on the matter:

The Mobius Strip idea, that you/we would just loop back in on the infinite track. Just more of a 3D track, than the 2D track surface my Universal Mobius Plane scenario entails. (also probably leads to figuring out shortcuts, like wormholes, by going around the 2D edge of the "cosmic strip." I think you get what I'm saying, or not.

My other thought, which by no means is my original idea, is that consciousness, of whatever kind, is a catalyst for creation. Maybe consciousness turns into the elusive "Dark Energy/Matter." So as we get farther than we can understand in our current status/forms, we would run into what dreams are made of... Stop! Strike that!... What dreams MAKE. Since above, a bubble theory was thought of, then it is so, until someone Schrodingers it otherwise.

What say you, other than I probably have spellings and grammatical errors?

originally posted by: openminded2011
This is kind of a thought experiment. Lets say you have traveled to the furthest point in the universe where there are stars. Beyond this point is just blackness. So you keep flying past it. At some point, when you have flown so far that you cannot see any stars or galaxies anymore, how would you measure motion? How would you know direction without any physical reference point? Does space cease to exist past the detectable limit of physical matter? Would it just be a dark void that just goes on endlessly? I have always thought that maybe somehow space itself is generated by the presence of matter, and when you pass the last detectable point in space where you can detect matter, space itself ceases to exist. So the universe would have a sort of self imposed boundry, beyond which is "nothing".

The universe or "a" universe, defined as a body of star clusters, planets and dust clouds, certainly does have a border. Its edge so far that we could not imagine its width. I would assume however, that beyond the border there is yet matter, though perhaps defined as in a static, unorganized state.

If our universe exists as a body of organized matter in a void of unorganized matter, then there might be other such bodies (universes) which are connected by threads or tunnels, possibly worm holes, that just shoot out from the edge like tendrils of the time-space continuum into other universes.

In effect, if one were to travel into outer-outer space, beyond the edge of his universe into the blackness, he might look back and see his universe as a huge rotating spiral galaxy, with its twisted arms of dust and matter illuminated by the glow of a trillion, billion galaxies. Looking forward, he might see fuzzy balls of light representing other universes, as numerous as the stars in the black sky on a cold night.

Though I'm not an expert, this is still an opportunity to attempt from my limited knowledge to clearup some standard terminology and misconceptions.

Currently accepted estimates of the age of the universe indicate approx 13.8 billion years. Also widely accepted, and verified countless times experimentally, is that the universal speed limit through the vacuum of space is the speed of light. This, in turn, leads to the common misconception that the radius of the observable universe must be 13.8 billion light-years. This makes perfect sense assuming we live in a flat, static universe. In actuality, though, spacetime is anything but flat or static. Rather, we are part of an expanding universe. Spacetime is continually expanding at an accelerated rate. Therefore, distance obtained by multiplying the speed of light by the age of the universe is not physically meaningful.

The observable universe (aka visible) includes all the matter that we are receiving light or other signals from. Taking the above into account, current estimates are that signals being received on Earth today include matter which is today actually about 46 billion ly from us, or 46 Gly. It’s the "proper distance", in a freeze-frame sense, that if you could pause the expansion process to give yourself time to send a radar beep, it would take 46 billion years from today to reach that most distant material/object.

So, that 46 Gly (giga for billion) is about how far away the matter actually is today that in early times emitted the cosmic microwave background radiation that we are now detecting. So we are in effect LOOKING AT matter that is now 46+ Gly from here, but as it appeared 13.8 billion years ago as a hot gas.

That actual distance is called the "particle horizon" to distinguish it from "cosmic event horizon". The cosmic event horizon is only about 16 Gly. It’s the proper distance today of the most distant galaxy we could expect to reach with a signal we send TODAY. Beyond that point the recession speed, due to expansion (not motion thru space), is already upwards of several times the speed of light, and so our signal would never reach it. Conversely, if an event takes place today in a galaxy that is beyond the 16 Gly cosmic event horizon, say an exploding star, we will never see it no matter how long we wait. Only if it’s LESS than 16 Gly from us (today, freeze-frame i.e. proper distance) will it eventually be visible to us here on Earth.

Something else I doubt a lot of folks realize is that most of the objects we can see today are well beyond today's cosmic event horizon. That is, most of the galaxies we observe today are actually more than 16 Gly distant from us; what we are observing is the galaxies as they once were. Therefore, although we are theoretically able to observe all the matter ever created within our universe, we just can’t see it as it exists TODAY. It’s likely to have remanifested itself into countless other forms.

What lies beyond that is purely speculative, and currently beyond our ability to know. Fun to think about, though.

I hope that halfway made sense. Some of these concepts can be hard to get a handle on, and are not exactly intuitive.

Cheers!