In Theory, all the stars could have gone 'out'....?

Question

already, but since it takes bunches of years for their light to reach us, how would we ever know?.... then we could be living inside the remains of a defunct universe.....we could live out our lives and never realize it was all over but the shoutin'....??

discuss, please?

Answer 1

little nicky gave a good answer.

The premise of your question is faulty. Theories are based upon hypotheses which stand up to evidence or good reasoning. This theory does not. Any hypothesis that all of the stars in the sky could have already gone out can be easily proved to be an incorrect hypothesis.

Let's start out by using correct terminology instead of 'bunches of years'. A light year is the distance light travels in one year. About 5.9 trillion miles or 9.5 trillion km.

Our Sun is an average star. It has an expected life span of 10 billion years. Other stars may live longer or shorter. If we use this as a rule of thumb, then we would say that all stars within 5 billion light years are still alive since it would take 5 billion light years for light from the farthest ones to reach us and they would today be roughly in the middle of their lives.

Let's put this 5 billion light years into perspective. The diameter of the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. This is WELL within the 5 billion figure. Let's go out farther- how about the entire Universe?

The visible universe is 13.7 billion light years in radius. This means that 1/3 of all the stars in the entire universe would be still alive today. To extrapolate this even further, the naked human eye is able to see about 2000 stars in the sky away from city lights. Almost all of these lie between 10-100 light years away. Therefore, almost NONE of the stars visible to the naked eye could have gone out by the time their light reached us. Actually having a star supernova during your lifetime is a rare occurance.

As has been previously pointed out, all stars were not made at the same time and new stars are constantly being created.

So the hypothesis that all the stars could have gone out is untrue.

Answer 2

The radius of the Universe according to Hubble's law is approx 15 billions light years+-. Hence it would take the Universe 94.5 billion years to spin on itself.
Therefore, it appears that the Universe according to Hubble's law has never made a complete revolution. However; this scenario negates the Laws of Gravity.

Nevertheles if the Universe did make one complete revolution in that period of time,then most stars would have already burned out and become frozen star without emitting any radiation what so ever that would be detected on Earth.

So what we would be observing , means that what we see is no longer real and the whole night sky only indicated that we are receiving light signal from a source which has displaced in space and is no longer at that location ,as stars are in continuall motion.. So what we see is no longer repesenting the real location of celestial strucures. .Its just a signal from the past.
This scenario bring out questions as follows;

Has the velocity of light travelling in the Universe been miscalculatecd and misunderstood.

Or the creation time of the Univese was almost instantaneous.

Has time being exagerated and misundestood.
Or perhaps there was never a Big bang Creation of the Universe that stemmed from the center of a geometrical volume, but that Creation of the Universe was created from the outside rather than the Inside.

A premoridal mass never existed as SINGULARITY. If the UNiverse was created from the outside, then what we perceive as time , would just not be real but only a dilation of time.

Pehaps a Science theory concerning the Universe may come into being in the future which might really explain how the Universe really came into being.

At present most theories of Creation of the Universe and particularly the Big Bang theory is only a matter of observation and interpretations of these observations.
As it is said;"Believe it or Not"

Answer 3

Not all stars are thousands of light years away. The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, is only 9 light years away. Since we still see it, we know that it did not go out 9 or more years ago. But you are correct that it could have gone out 8 years ago and we wouldn't know until next year. Since I plan on living more than 10 more years, it is not true to say that I could be living my whole life in a defunct universe.

Answer 4

Most stars live for billions of years, and new stars are constantly forming from interstellar gas. So all the stars are not going to go out for a very long time.

One way to think about this: when we look out, we see some stars that are close, and some that are very far away. The ones that are very far away emitted their light billions of years ago, while the ones that are close emitted their light only a few years ago. But on average, there is about the same amount of light from those very ancient stars as there is from the stars that are only a few lightyears away. So things have been going along in pretty much the same way (with some small changes that are important to astronomers) for a few billion years now, and it is highly unlikely that it will all change soon.

Answer 5

While true, we are *also* seeing new stars being born - some less than 100,000 years old. Most stars we 'see' in the sky are closer (less than 100 light years away), meaning that if any in the vicinity died, we'd know relatively quick.

At the same time, we know how long stars live - some have very short life spans, some are billions of years long - and, we also know (from light output, spectra of light, and size) how long stars have been alive, and how much *longer* they have.

I'm pretty confident that there are some stars we see glowing now (through telescopes, anyway), that have died (probably by going nova), and the "now" we see is how they looked thousands or millions of years ago.

Answer 6

What you say is true up to a point. However, new stars are constantly being created everywhere in space. We can observe lots of these new-born suns relatively nearby, therefore it's only simple logic to know that billions upon billions of new stars are born throughout the universe.

On the other hand, most astronomers now believe that the time will indeed come when the universe just sort of runs out of gas and nothing will be left but a cold, empty space slowly expanding. Not to worry though...we're talking unimagineable ga-zillions of years in the future.

Answer 7

It would not be theory but speculation. You need to be careful with the word "theory" around here. There is no reason to suspect that any nearby stars (within a few dozen light years) are anything but constant. Further away it is certain that "stars" are not now as we see them, as the light from them has taken millions or billions of years to reach us.

Supernova 1987A is well over 175,000 light years away and blew up just as humans were bashing stones together to make tools. But we did not see it until 20 years ago.

If the Universe went kaput there is no reason to expect that our Sun would survive, in which case we would know within ten minutes. Actually we would not know, because an effect large enough to extinguish the Universe instantly would extinguish us as well, instantly.

We're all living on borrowed time! Gah!! (Runs around holding head in hands, collides with wall.)

Answer 8

While it's hypothetically possible, it's highly improbable. Stars can live for billions of years. Even accounting for the fact the the brightest ones are the shortest-lived, the death rate among the few thousand stars we can see with the naked eye is going to be on the order of a handful per million years. Among bright "short"-lived stars, the death rate by supernova in our galaxy is estimated to be one every fifty years (out of several hundred billion stars). The last one close enough to be seen was 400 years ago.

Furthermore, stars don't just suddenly burn out; their death throes last thousands of years. There are a number of stars in our corner of the galaxy that are considered candidates to go supernova ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova#Milky_Way_candidates ), but even the most advanced of these (Eta Carinae) might have a few thousand years left in it.

Add to this the fact that dead stars provide material from which new stars can be born, and you can expect there to be at least a few stars for the next hundred trillion years or so.

Answer 9

Uhh, no, because stars are constantly being born. One star dying can give birth to many stars. So if anything, there are more stars being born than dying.
Also, some stars are close to us, I'm not too sure how close the closest star to us is, but its like 20-something light years away, and we know their age, so we know they'll live for a few more billion years.
So no the universe is not empty.

Answer 10

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