Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Terribly sad: "as the universe expands faster and faster, it will eventually get to a point where . . . all but our local group of galaxies will have moved so far away they will be lost forever." They aren't disappearing, but rather the space between them will be expanding so fast -- faster than the speed of light -- that "the light from those galaxies will never reach us again." Among other things, this means that "any cosmologist of that distant time who tries to figure out the history of the universe will have no clue to the Big Bang or the existence of the vast clusters of galaxies we can see today in every direction . . . ." Depressing. And lonely.
