What should we be doing for future astronomers?

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The discussion centers on the future of astronomy in an expanding universe, where distant galaxies will eventually become invisible to future astronomers. Participants express concern about how to preserve knowledge for future generations, questioning whether a grand project could be established to share data. It is noted that while non-local galaxies will fade from view, they will still be detectable in various wavelengths for a long time. Theories like the "big freeze" suggest a future where the universe becomes increasingly empty, but ideas about traveling to another universe remain speculative. Overall, the conversation highlights the challenges of communication and knowledge preservation across vast cosmic timescales.
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Given the expanding universe, one fine night astronomers will look up and see the milky way and those galaxies in our local group and nothing else.
Is there a grand project we can come up with to present to our descendants in the hope that they can do better with the data than we have been able to? Or will non local stars and galaxies just become a myth as space/time expands?

Mekon
 
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This won't be a factor for billions and billions of years. The astronomers of that time won't speak our language, and will live many light years away from us, or even in other far away galaxies. That is, there is really no possible way I can think of for us to communicate with them to leave them our collective wisdom.
 
Mekon said:
Given the expanding universe, one fine night astronomers will look up and see the milky way and those galaxies in our local group and nothing else.
Is there a grand project we can come up with to present to our descendants in the hope that they can do better with the data than we have been able to? Or will non local stars and galaxies just become a myth as space/time expands?

Mekon
Just because these objects will have passed beyond our horizon doesn't mean we'll be suddenly unable to see them. What it does mean is that we won't get any new light from them, but will be seeing their past, from before they crossed the horizon. The light will continually be redshifted, and will take a very, very long time to become undetectable.

That is, one day, the local group will be the only galaxies visible in the optical, but then there will still be galaxies visible in the infra-red. When they become invisible in the infra-red, people will be able to detect them in the microwave, and so on and so forth. It'll take an extraordinarily long time for them to be completely undetectable.
 
Theres also a theory called the big freeze, where according to chaotic inflationary theory, the universe will keep expanding, so much that it will be so empty that everything drops to absolute zero and that's the time, astronomers and physicists say that we will have gained the technology to move out of our universe through a worm hole into another "warm" universe.
 
libbon said:
Theres also a theory called the big freeze, where according to chaotic inflationary theory, the universe will keep expanding, so much that it will be so empty that everything drops to absolute zero and that's the time, astronomers and physicists say that we will have gained the technology to move out of our universe through a worm hole into another "warm" universe.
That's, um, not quite right. It doesn't actually drop to absolute zero, just asymptotically approaches it without ever reaching zero.

Anyway, Wikipedia has some excellent stuff on the ultimate fate of the universe here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe

But the more crucial point is that any idea of it being possible to tunnel into another universe is pure speculation, and should be treated as likely as most anything you see in Star Trek.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology) Was a matter density right after the decoupling low enough to consider the vacuum as the actual vacuum, and not the medium through which the light propagates with the speed lower than ##({\epsilon_0\mu_0})^{-1/2}##? I'm asking this in context of the calculation of the observable universe radius, where the time integral of the inverse of the scale factor is multiplied by the constant speed of light ##c##.
The formal paper is here. The Rutgers University news has published a story about an image being closely examined at their New Brunswick campus. Here is an excerpt: Computer modeling of the gravitational lens by Keeton and Eid showed that the four visible foreground galaxies causing the gravitational bending couldn’t explain the details of the five-image pattern. Only with the addition of a large, invisible mass, in this case, a dark matter halo, could the model match the observations...
Hi, I’m pretty new to cosmology and I’m trying to get my head around the Big Bang and the potential infinite extent of the universe as a whole. There’s lots of misleading info out there but this forum and a few others have helped me and I just wanted to check I have the right idea. The Big Bang was the creation of space and time. At this instant t=0 space was infinite in size but the scale factor was zero. I’m picturing it (hopefully correctly) like an excel spreadsheet with infinite...
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