Do Stars Actually Still Exist?

[bobthebandit]

If it is true that light from stars has taken millions of years to reach us, than how do we know that these stars are still in existence? Which raises a further question that the Universe may now no longer exist either, and we are now just seeing an image of what was once out there in space.

[Teddio]

All of the stars seen with the naked eye are in our (Milky Way) galaxy. Most of them are only dozens or hundreds of light years away. The lifetime of a star like the Sun may be 9 billion years so observed changes will be imperceptible in a human lifetime.
Constellations do change over time but this is due to the relative motion of the stars as they orbit around the galaxy.
A star to look out for is the red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. It may explode into a supernova any time soon. Betelgeuse is about 600 light years distance from Earth, so it may have already happened.

[askyourgran]

I find this subject fascinating but I know very little about it. The constellations have been around for millions of years. Sirius the brightest star was the guiding star at the time when the Pyramids at Giza were built. It would be interesting to know what the astronomers find when they build the new super telescope.

[Icenian]

Teddio, I don’t “believe” in any model of cosmology as if it were some kind of religion in which we must have faith without question. But I do acknowledge that some evidence are closer to the truth and more convincing than others.

The “Big Bang” has had too many unconvincing somersaults which left me very sceptical about its validity. It kicked-off with the Cosmic Background Radiation (which gave Hoyle brief doubt, but soon afterwards he published “Steady State Revisited”). However, this CBR had already been calculated at 3 degrees Kelvin back in the 1920’s by Sir Arthur Eddington and explained without resorting to a universal hot bang.

Apart from that, no one has ever explained how a universal mass of 4.2 x 10^52 kilograms, concentrated in a singularity, the mother and father of all black-holes (by definition), can blow up. Or if it was not mass but energy, then what supernatural force could contain 3.775 x 10^69 joules in a point in space. Or if neither mass nor energy, then what was the stuff that blew up.

Be that as it may, once the “stuff “ exploded and turned into mass obeying fully established universal laws, with a Schwarzschild radius of 6.3 billion light-years, there is no explanation how the distant galaxies escaped through the universal Event Horizon

I am very sceptical about a variable speed of light and variable gravity and “god-particles” and umpteenth new fields of force required to dig the BB out of its ever deepening hole, but I am most sceptical about the “age” of the BB universe which kept going up every time globular clusters were found to be older than their BB mother, until the big bangers settled on 13.7 billion years.

Very clever that, but this goes beyond coincidence into the bounds of fraud, for 13.7 billion years, hence a universal radius of 13.7 billion light-years, “just happens to be” the distance of the most remote galaxies which are preceding away (from any observer in the universe) at the speed of light and, therefore impossible to see, thus providing the big bangers with an “edge” of the universe.

Your point about the remote galaxies looking entirely different in their locality now to how we see them today, is valid and makes my point perfectly. For if what we see is how these galaxies looked some 12 (or more) billion years ago, then by what divine magic did they form and space out pretty much as nearby galaxies, so close to the birth of the BB hydrogen, their building blocks?

Eddington, Hoyle, Gold and Bondi (may they rest in peace) missed out on a Nobel Prize, but whoever works out (without fear of Genesis) the mechanism for free neutrons coming into being and dividing within 12 minutes of their birth into atoms of hydrogen at the rate of 9.656E-38 grams/cubic meter/sec and small packages of energy (CBR?) without the need for a creator-god, would deserve a lorry-load of Nobel Prizes, for sheer guts.

[LazyGun]

@Icenian

First a disclaimer; I am not a cosmologist, or physicist. or mathematician, so cannot pronounce on subjects like this with any sort of authority. I am an interested bystander; Interested in the Science, and what it portends.

There are undoubtedly questions to be asked about the formation of the universe. Some of the concepts used within the current mainstream standard model sit rather uneasily with me, since, to me at least, they appear to be concepts dreamt up to explain observed anomalies.

But I accept that this might just be a problem for me, as a layman.

You made a long post about why you have problems with the "big-bang", some of which i sort of follow, others I can find no reference for.

And you do not offer an alternative model, which in your opinion, might better explain the observations.

CMBR.
You appear to be conflating Eddingtons work on an Interstellar radiation field with CMBR. As best I can tell, these are 2 different things.

You claim that Hoyle accounted for CMBR in his work "steady state cosmology revisited" - but I can find no evidence for that. His conjecture was that CMBR was in fact light from stars, scattered by interstellar dust and particles, and would lead to a field that was far more heterogeneous than the CMBR actually is.

The Big Bang as an exploding singularity
I can find no reference to this within the standard model. This is not my understanding of the theory at all.

Higgs Boson, Variable speeds of light, Variable gravity.
You need to explain more clearly what are your issues here.Recent work at the LHC appears to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, further confirming the standard model of quantum theory and sub-atomic particles. Again, I have not really seen any specific reference to the Higgs Boson and the Big Bang, although I have read speculation about the inflaton, a scalar field similar to the Higgs, as a theoretical explanation of Inflation and island universes withing an ever inflationary multiverse. And I am not sure I understand your reference to variable light and gravity?

And accusing mainstream astrophysicists and cosmologists of fraud seems both hyperbolic and unnecessary. What exactly is the fraud being committed? Where is your evidence?

You make other very specific claims. "the mechanism for free neutrons coming into being and dividing within 12 minutes of their birth into atoms of hydrogen at the rate of 9.656E-38 grams/cubic meter/sec and small packages of energy (CBR?) ".

Problem is, you offer no references for that. Where did these figures come from?

Its OK to be sceptical, and standard models should be challenged. But hyperbolic accusations of mass fraud, and dismissive criticism of standard models, without offering an alternative that better explains the observations, the maths and the facts is just a cop-out; A whinging from the sidelines.

If the big bang theory is such a poor fit, what can you offer that gives us a better model?

[LazyGun]

@ Bob - i do not think you can conclude that the universe is just a blank void beyond the sun. We have too much evidence from observations further out than that.

We do see light from suns that are just being formed,although you would not be able to distinguish them from the naked eye. Some researchers, from their observations, have conjectured that the Universe is less fecund than it once was, and new stars are being created less frequently;
Have a read

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-11/almost-all-stars-are-old-and-universe-making-hardly-any-new-ones

@Icenian. My previous post to you was based solely upon your own detailed post preceding it. I had not read your previous posts where you expressed a preference for a steady-state universe over the big-bang /inflationary model. Sorry for criticisms within my last post over not offering an alternative view.

I would however be interested to hear ( preferably in a bullet point format) those observations of our universe that are better explained by the steady state universe rather than the current model?

[Icenian]

LazyGun, you are right to demand evidence for and against any model. I have presented on other fora my understanding and my doubts, covering the points you raised to such an extent that I am beginning to tire of hearing my own voice, so no bullet points. Instead, I would point you to 30 arguments against the big bang, some, but not all, are in favour of the Continuous Creation model, which you will find in Meta Research Bulletin #11. It deals with problems associated with Adjustable Parameters, CBR, Large Scale Structure, Galactic Local Streaming, Inflation, Gunn-Peterson Effect, the good old 1st law of thermodynamics, plus a host of other observed and presumed phenomena, and there is more in appendix #1. There is also an interesting article in “Science” magazine published on 25 April 2002, proposing a third model which plagues both houses. Have fun researching.

[mibn2cweus]

Stars do not typically just up and disappear, they fade away slowly over billions of years or if of sufficient size explode leaving a remnant that also fades away over billions of years. The most distant stars that can be picked out without a telescope are no further than a few thousand light years away and most will still be visible billions of years into the future . . . assuming there's still any one around to see them.