How many stars are known to exist

[securityguy]

How many stars are known to exist?

On a clear, moonless night about 3,000 stars are visible with the unaided eye. A small telescope will increase the number to around 100,000 stars. But this is just the beginning! The stars we can easily see are all in our corner of the Milky Way Galaxy. The entire galaxy numbers about 100 billion stars. And beyond the Milky Way are other galaxies with many shapes and sizes. Around 100 billion such galaxies are known to exist.

Taking the Milky Way as an average galaxy, the total number of known stars is thus (100 billion)2=(1011)2=1022. These estimated stars number 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, when we write this number out. This figure would be pronounced as “ten billion trillion” stars.

Telescope. Illustration copyrighted.Suppose these stars were divided up among the world's total population of 6 billion people. Then each person on Earth would receive more than 1 trillion stars!

Yet all these stars may be only one page in God's catalog of the heavens. New instruments continue to probe deeper into space, with no end in sight. What an excellent way for the Creator to show his glory!

Whatever the number he has created, God calls all the stars by name, and he keeps count of them (Ps. 147:4; Isa. 40:26).

Author: Dr. Donald B. DeYoung - adapted from Astronomy and the Bible: Questions and Answers, 2nd Edition (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2000), 176 pp.

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[Nelg]

And all this came into existence at one point, when space and time began, so did the multiple galaxies.  It is called "the Big Bang Theory" in which all time, space, and matter were created by God!  All of them are fixed in place and continue to move outward as space/time continues to expand.  

One argument that I find intriguing is the Kalam Theory, which is hundreds of years old, but has been brought back into popularity by Dr. William Crag.  The basis of the kalam theory is this:

1.     Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2.     The universe began to exist.

3.     Therefore, the universe has a cause.   

Craig argues that the first premise is “intuitively obvious” and should be accepted without trying to base it on something else. 

He then defends the second premise on both philosophical and scientific grounds. His principal argument here is a philosophical argument based on the impossibility of a temporally infinite past. The idea of time extending backward infinitely (what is known as an infinite regress), through an actually infinite series of moments or events, is said to be inherently irrational. Therefore, on a priori philosophical grounds, this argument concludes that the universe must have had a beginning. 

The third statement is a conclusion that follows necessarily from the foregoing two premises but leaves open the question of what this cause is. Craig offers additional philosophical and scientific arguments in support of the belief “that it is a personal being who caused the universe.”

Since it is a philosophical argument it does not say that it is the personal God, Jehovah; that argument or point is left after a complete discussion on the other evidence.  

[DWitte]

At some point in time, scientists will "discover" what they have been looking for for eons and it won't be a Big Bang or any Theory to go along with it.  I am not making this statement to cause disagreement or conflict with you Nelg but only to offer information for discussion.  The "Theory" is as full of holes as is Swiss cheese but it serves a purpose for now.  As we search the cosmos in an attempt to tell our story, we needed a starting point but didn't have one.  We're telling the story backwards, from end to beginning.  Any Scientist with an ounce of dignity will tell you there could be no "Big Bang".  I'm not going into all the details here.  As of right now, I'm having a hard time explaining myself anyways.  If anyone has specific questions, I will try to answer them as best I can but first let me say this.  I do believe in a Supreme Being.(God)  I also believe this Being could, if desired, make something from nothing.  I also believe we and all things created around around us are done so by what we consider to be natural causes and not some form of magic.  As an example, the Bible says: God said let there be light, and it was light.  Doesn't necessarily mean there was light in an instant.  It might have taken a thousand or a million or a thousand million years to come to be.  Some things we just don't know, we don't have to or need to know.  That's what Faith is.  That's enough for me.

 

Thank you for letting me ramble.  I couldn't sleep and came upon this thread and I'm glad I did.

 

DW

 

Nelg, I like what you posted about the Kalam Theory.  It makes me think.

Edited November 30, 2015 by DWitte

[Nelg]

At some point in time, scientists will "discover" what they have been looking for for eons and it won't be a Big Bang or any Theory to go along with it.  I am not making this statement to cause disagreement or conflict with you Nelg but only to offer information for discussion.  The "Theory" is as full of holes as is Swiss cheese but it serves a purpose for now.  As we search the cosmos in an attempt to tell our story, we needed a starting point but didn't have one.  We're telling the story backwards, from end to beginning.  Any Scientist with an ounce of dignity will tell you there could be no "Big Bang".  I'm not going into all the details here.  As of right now, I'm having a hard time explaining myself anyways.  If anyone has specific questions, I will try to answer them as best I can but first let me say this.  I do believe in a Supreme Being.(God)  I also believe this Being could, if desired, make something from nothing.  I also believe we and all things created around around us are done so by what we consider to be natural causes and not some form of magic.  As an example, the Bible says: God said let there be light, and it was light.  Doesn't necessarily mean there was light in an instant.  It might have taken a thousand or a million or a thousand million years to come to be.  Some things we just don't know, we don't have to or need to know.  That's what Faith is.  That's enough for me.

 

Thank you for letting me ramble.  I couldn't sleep and came upon this thread and I'm glad I did.

 

DW

 

Nelg, I like what you posted about the Kalam Theory.  It makes me think.

Here are some addition information that you might consider.

 

One of the most astonishing developments of modern astronomy, which Ghazali would never have anticipated, is that we now have strong scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe. The first scientific confirmation of the universe’s beginning comes from the expansion of the universe.

All throughout history men have assumed that the universe as a whole was unchanging. Of course, things in the universe were moving about and changing, but the universe itself was just there, so to speak. This was also Albert Einstein’s assumption when he first began to apply his new theory of gravity, called the General Theory of Relativity, to the universe in 1917.

But Einstein found there was something terribly amiss. His equations described a universe which was either blowing up like a balloon or else collapsing in upon itself. During the 1920s the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgian astronomer Georges LeMaître decided to take Einstein’s equations at face value, and as a result they came up independently with models of an expanding universe. In 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, through tireless observations at Mt. Wilson Observatory, made a startling discovery which verified Friedman and LeMaître’s theory. He found that the light from distant galaxies appeared to be redder than expected. This “red shift” in the light was most plausibly due to the stretching of the light waves as the galaxies are moving away from us. Wherever Hubble trained his telescope in the night sky, he observed this same red-shift in the light from the galaxies. It appeared that we are at the center of a cosmic explosion, and all of the other galaxies are flying away from us at fantastic speeds!

Now according to the Friedman-LeMaître model, we are not really at the center of the universe. Rather an observer in any galaxy will look out and see the other galaxies moving away from him. This is because, according to the theory, it is really space itself which is expanding. The galaxies are actually at rest in space, but they recede from one another as space itself expands.

The Friedman-LeMaître model eventually came to be known as the Big Bang theory. But that name can be misleading. Thinking of the expansion of the universe as a sort of explosion could mislead us into thinking that the galaxies are moving out into a pre-existing, empty space from a central point. That would be a complete misunderstanding of the model. The theory is much more radical than that.

As you trace the expansion of the universe back in time, everything gets closer and closer together. Eventually the distance between any two points in space becomes zero. You can’t get any closer than that! So at that point you’ve reached the boundary of space and time. Space and time cannot be extended any further back than that. It is literally the beginning of space and time.

To get a picture of this we can portray our three-dimensional space as a two-dimensional disk which shrinks as you go back in time. 

 

Geometrical representation of space-time picture a cone standing on it's point. The two-dimensional disc represents our three-dimensional space. The vertical dimension represents time. As one goes back in time, space shrinks until the distance between any two points is zero. Space-time thus has the geometry of a cone. The point of the cone is the boundary of space and time.

Eventually, the distance between any two points in space becomes zero. So space-time can be represented geometrically as a cone. What’s significant about this is that while a cone can be extended indefinitely in one direction, it has a boundary point in the other direction. Because this direction represents time and the boundary point lies in the past, the model implies that past time is finite and had a beginning.

Because space-time is the arena in which all matter and energy exist, the beginning of space-time is also the beginning of all matter and energy. It’s the beginning of the universe.

Notice that there’s simply nothing prior to the initial boundary of space-time. Let’s not be misled by words. When cosmologists say, “There is nothing prior to the initial boundary,” they do not mean that there is some state of affairs prior to it, and that is a state of nothingness. That would be to treat nothing as though it were something! Rather they mean that at the boundary point, it is false that “There is something prior to this point.”

The standard Big Bang model thus predicts an absolute beginning of the universe. If this model is correct, then we have amazing scientific confirmation of the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument.

So is the model correct, or, more importantly, is it correct in predicting a beginning of the universe? Despite its empirical confimation, the standard Big Bang model will need to be modified in various ways. The model is based, as we’ve seen, on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. But Einstein’s theory breaks down when space is shrunk down to sub-atomic proportions. We’ll need to introduce sub-atomic physics at that point, and no one is sure how this is to be done. Moreover, the expansion of the universe is probably not constant, as in the standard model. It’s probably accelerating and may have had a brief moment of super-rapid expansion in the past.

But none of these adjustments need affect the fundamental prediction of the absolute beginning of the universe. Indeed, physicists have proposed scores of alternative models over the decades since Friedman and LeMaître’s work, and those that do not have an absolute beginning have been repeatedly shown to be unworkable. Put more positively, the only viable non-standard models have been those that involve an absolute beginning to the universe. That beginning may or may not involve a beginning point. But on theories (such as Stephen Hawking’s “no boundary” proposal) that do not have a point-like beginning, the past is still finite, not infinite. The universe has not existed forever according to such theories but came into existence, even if it didn’t do so at a sharply defined point.

In a sense, the history of twentieth century cosmology can be seen as a series of one failed attempt after another to avoid the absolute beginning predicted by the standard Big Bang model. That prediction has now stood for nearly 100 years, during a period of enormous advances in observational astronomy and creative theoretical work in astrophysics.

Meanwhile, a series of remarkable singularity theorems has increasingly tightened the loop around empirically tenable models by showing that under more and more generalized conditions, a beginning is inevitable. In 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to show that any universe which is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion throughout each history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a beginning. That goes for multiverse scenarios, too. In 2012 Vilenkin showed that models which do not meet this one condition still fail for other reasons to avert the beginning of the universe. Vilenkin concluded, “None of these scenarios can actually be past eternal." [Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin, “Did the universe have a beginning?” arXiv:1204.4658v1 [hep-th] 20 Apr 2012, p. 5. For an accessible video, see see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXCQelhKJ7A (accessed February 23, 2014), where Vilenkin concludes, “there are no models at this time that provide a satisfactory model for a universe without a beginning.”] “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”[A.Vilenkin, cited in “Why physicists can't avoid a creation event,” by Lisa Grossman, New Scientist (January 11, 2012).]

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem proves that classical space-time, under a single, very general condition, cannot be extended to past infinity but must reach a boundary at some time in the finite past. Now either there was something on the other side of that boundary or not. If not, then that boundary just is the beginning of the universe. If there was something on the other side, then it will be a region described by the yet to be discovered theory of quantum gravity. In that case, Vilenkin says, it will be the beginning of the universe. Either way, the universe began to exist.

Of course, scientific results are always provisional. We can fully expect that new theories will be proposed, attempting to avoid the universe’s beginning. 

Edited November 30, 2015 by Nelg

[umbertino]

It's fascinating for sure....Grazie for sharing

[Peace]

But "outer space" is a vacuum! So how does any of it not get sucked into the "void"?! It is all a fallacy!

 

 

That is because the vacuum of space does not exist. There is a firmament above. Just open up the bible. He says we are under a firmament! 

 

 

Plus Einsteins Theory is just a theory that has been debunked by sound arguments it is not "law".

 

 

There is a war on for your mind and I think that God wants us to figure it out. So he gave us eyeballs and senses to use. So step outside climb a hill a mountain or get in a plane and watch the horizon line follow your eye level. 

 

 

We have the ability to find the answers without anyone telling us. Just go within and remember the senses that we are endowed with.

 

 

If I were "evil" I would seek to destroy the minds of men. Tell them lie after lie after lie until they don't know if they are coming or going.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

Adolf Hitler

 

[Shabibilicious]

If I were "evil" I would seek to destroy the minds of men. Tell them lie after lie after lie until they don't know if they are coming or going.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

Adolf Hitler

 

aka.....The Jersey City Muslim Dance Ensemble Theory.    

 

GO RV, then BV

[Nelg]

Peace, you do not need to deny science to accept a religion.  Christianity is based on evidence (not proof), but enough evidence that one can believe there is a god.  Additional evidence directs one toward a personal God, Jesus Christ, who has created all the wonders of the universe.  

By the way, is the firmament only around 32 miles up?  Now wouldn't that be a short trip?  But I completely doubt that it is 32 miles!!  

At any given point or place on our global earth one will find that if you look up, there is the firmament above us.  To always believe that you are being told a lie, is to admit that what I believe about being told a lie may be true and you have been told a lie.  What confusion!  

Not everyone is trying to deceive you.  

 

Nor is everyone being deceived.  However, I'm not so sure about your information and the "assurance" that it is valid.  I'm sure its not.  But you will  never believe that because it contradicts your information. Therefore I am lying to you; or so you believe.