Black Holes in Galaxy Genesis

Excerpt from Creation: Towards a Theory of All Things by John Umana
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The Big Picture - The Big Bang
The most massive explosion of all time occurred 13.7 billion years ago. It is still ongoing. God created the physical Universe with an incredibly white-hot and fast-moving explosion from nothingness, the Big Bang. The temperature of the fireball was 100 million trillion trillion degrees. At one and the same time, God created the fabric of space-time, matter and energy, from the singularity forever expanding outwards. The cooled-down remnants of this blast, microwave astronomers can still observe today throughout the Universe.
When we think of the Big Bang as starting from the size of a fist or even a needle point, we are still off the mark. The Big Bang started from nothing, less than the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Even the period at the end of a sentence occupies a tiny bit of space, but before Creation there was no space or time in which to place a fireball. Then how could God create the entire expanding Universe from nothingness? How could the entire preemergent Universe fit into less space than the period at the end of a sentence? What caused the expansion? God pictured it expanding forth. Idea precedes Creation. Like a peanut shell, once the bubble of space-time had been created, the expanding fireball was conceived, simultaneously inflating and stretching out space-time with it. The expansion of the cosmos is uniform throughout. Different parts of the Universe do not expand by different amounts.
The theory of inflation, developed in the 1980’s (named after a pun on monetary inflation), correctly maintains that a split second after the Big Bang commenced, there was an extraordinarily rapid expansion of the Universe -- the rather cursory period between 10-35 seconds and 10-33 seconds post-Big Bang.[i] With rapid supercooling, the bubble of space-time containing the inchoate cosmos suddenly was driven by an “inflaton field” (correctly spelled) to expand exponentially. Picture this -- in less than one millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the entire Universe suddenly ballooned out from the size of less than a speck of dust to the vast size of our Milky Way Galaxy. (Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter.) Triggered by separation of the strong force (the nuclear force that holds quarks together inside of protons and neutrons and tightly packs protons and neutrons into the atomic nucleus), gravity which normally pulls objects towards each other, became a massive repulsive energy. The tiny Universe increased in size by a factor of 1030 to 10100 or more in this infinitesimal instant than in the 13.7 billion years since. Talk about a big blast! This superaccelerated expansion of the fabric of space-time for an exceedingly brief instant far outran even the speed of light. Not to worry, though. The speed of the expansion of cosmic space does not disturb Dr. Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which applies only to motion through space, not to expanding space.
Supreme Creator’s first pitch of the baseball season was a fast ball clocked at millions of trillions of times the speed of light! Yes, the pitch was right in there for strike one! And the cosmos was off to an exciting start! But like any great pitcher, Supreme Being did not just sit back after the first pitch and let the cosmos unwind on its own. There were many heavy hitters coming up to bat, rubbing the rosin bag against the grip and gritting their teeth in anticipation.
After that rapid ballooning out for less than a billionth of a second, space continued to expand and cool at a much more leisurely pace. As the cosmos expanded, it rapidly cooled from the intense heat of its birth. Under inflation cosmology, quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s pre-inflationary kernel would have been blown up to astronomical scales in the formation of galaxies and clusters as the cosmos expanded. But, as we shall see, far more was involved in the overall structure of the cosmos and the formation of galaxies, stars and planets than haphazard quantum perturbations.
In the initial fireball, the strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force were undifferentiated. Atoms did not yet exist. The first types of “particles” were of two types, fermions (leptons and quarks) and bosons (the X-particles, gluons, vector mesons and photons). They would lead to the creation of everything we observe on Earth, in the sky and space, and to the creation of life that exists throughout the Universe.
The first few moments of the super-heated fireball produced the lightest elements. One second after the Big Bang, the temperature of the Universe had cooled down to a balmy 10 billion degrees. It was filled with neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons and neutrinos. As the Universe cooled down within a minute from this searing heat, the neutrons either decayed into protons and electrons or combined with protons to make a hydrogen isotope known as deuterium. During the first three minutes of the Universe, most of the deuterium fused to make helium. Trace amounts of lithium were also produced at this time. This process of the formation of the light elements in the infant Universe -- hydrogen, deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7 -- is called “Big Bang nucleosynthesis.” After three minutes of nucleosynthesis, the temperature and density of the nascent Universe fell below that required for nuclear fusion for a stretch of time.
About 300,000 years later, the Universe having cooled down to 3,000 Kelvins, electrons mated with atomic nuclei to form atoms. The Universe became transparent to electromagnetic radiation, and began emitting cosmic background radiation that is observed today in the microwave spectrum. The overall temperature of the cosmos has continued cooling over time.
About 200 million years after the Big Bang, nuclear fusion kicked in and eventually produced the heavier elements. Elements heavier than lithium were all manufactured in stars and with the explosion of those first stars blasted out far into interstellar space. During the late stages of stellar evolution, massive stars fuse helium to form carbon, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, and iron. Elements heavier than iron are produced in the outer envelopes of super-giant stars and blasted into interstellar space in the explosions of these stars known as supernovae. The first moments of the Big Bang created principally hydrogen (mass 1) and helium (mass 4), because there are no long lived atomic nuclei with mass 5 and 8 to make the bridge to heavier elements such as carbon (mass 12). But in stars the formation of carbon is possible through the “triple-alpha reaction” where three helium nuclei (alpha particles) fuse under intense heat to form a nucleus of carbon-12.[ii] All carbon-based life forms on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe are composed of such carbonaceous stardust formed deep within the interiors of stars. The Universe cooled as it expanded and has continued to cool.
But even before formation of stars, the ambient gas in the Universe had been ionized by the first 200 million years after the Big Bang, due to ionizing radiation from a population of primordial black holes. Black holes -- gravity implosions of dead stars of at least 5 to 20 solar masses -- are the device for organizing the Universe, as we shall see. They are commonplace throughout the Universe, though (indirectly) observed only in the last ten years with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories.
“Quasars” are the most brilliant and distant objects in the far Universe that astronomers can observe. They are supermassive black holes with masses exceeding a million and even a billion suns. They gobble up gas and entire stars from their host galaxies as though nothing. They shine brilliantly by converting the gravitational energy of the matter falling into the black hole into light. The most distant quasars came into being 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. Some smaller versions of quasars are known as microquasars, shooting corkscrew, spinning jets of matter in opposite directions at near light speed. These look something like two elongated tornados simultaneously touching down on opposite sides of a star.
Even before black holes were observed by astronomers (particularly by the Hubble Telescope since December 1993), the concept of a black hole was a dramatic mathematical deduction of Professor Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The physics professor concluded that, if a star was sufficiently massive (far larger than our sun), then at the end of its life when it had exhausted its nuclear fuel, it would collapse and continue to fall into itself under the force of its own gravity. A black hole exists in a state of continuing free fall, and relentlessly pulls matter, energy and light into it. In the black hole, space is so curved by the intense gravity of the imploded dead star that space and time become interchanged. The collapse of a massive star into a black hole is deadly to any habitable planet nearby because it results in lethal gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe these days. Such gamma-ray bursts from black holes would wipe out all life on an inhabited planet within a range of 3,000 light-years distance. Fortunately, such bursts are extremely rare. NASA’s second Great Observatory, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (launched in 1991 and brought down in 2000), proved that jets of matter stream away from black holes at nearly the speed of light.
Creator went to work creating the numerous worlds within the Universe that He has created. There is not a single instant of time when God is not at work in the Universe creating and tailoring, altering and organizing, and breathing life into new worlds. The curtain goes up and the curtain goes down, and new life forms and are being created constantly. The Universe has not recollapsed and will not recollapse. There will be no “Big Crunch.” Neither did a big crunch precede the Big Bang as a few theoreticians have posited. The hypothesis that the Universe recycles over and over is not correct. To be sure, matter and energy are interchangeable and in that sense “recycle” within the Universe. The proposition that there are additional or parallel universes in the physical world, is not correct. The suggestion that inflation recurs repeatedly and sprouts new universes from existing ones, is not correct. The Universe had a beginning in the Big Bang. But it will have no end.
The rate of expansion of the Universe precisely equals the critical rate needed to avoid recollapse of the entire Universe. The matter/energy density of the Universe exactly equals the critical density but is not greater. If it were greater than the critical density, that would result in slowing down the galaxies and eventually recollapsing the entire Universe, springing them back inwards like an overstretched Slinky toy. Did we just get lucky? Just another small coincidence? This means that the geometry of the Universe is flat, as opposed to being closed, such that, for example, the photons of a laser beam fired into space will continue in a straight line without curling back onto themselves, as they would if the Universe were closed or space were in the shape of a sphere. Cosmologists represent this flat geometry of the cosmos by Ω = 1, where Ω (omega) is the matter/energy density of cosmic matter divided by the critical density needed to bring the universe to recollapse. If Ω is less than 1, the Universe would remain open (eternally expanding). But if Ω is greater than 1, the expanding Universe would eventually collapse back onto itself into the singularity from which it originally arose, like a collapsing Slinky. Not to worry, the Universe is precisely at the borderline between continuing expansion and eventual recollapse. What is responsible for such incredible fine-tuning of the cosmos from inception and keeping it precisely that way for billion of years? Astrophysicists really have little in the way of a satisfactory answer to the flatness problem (the precise calibration of the cosmos since its birth to avoid recollapse), if they attempt to explain cosmic flatness as mere coincidence resulting from chance events. But 13.7 billion years of such chance events? That is no explanation worth its salt. None that any open-minded scientist or philosopher should accept.
The proposition that the geometry of the Universe is flat, does not in any way undermine Professor Einstein’s theory of general relativity -- which correctly holds that the presence of mass, such as the sun or a planet, causes the fabric of space around it to warp or bend. This warping or gravitomagnetism really does occur. Stanford’s Gravity B Probe was lofted into polar orbit on April 20, 2004 from Vandenberg Air Force Base to test this prediction, and, respectfully, it will prove general relativity beyond cavil within the next few years. The warping of space is gravity. General relativity predicts that as Earth rotates it will twist the space-time fabric around with it, known as the Lense-Thirring effect or “frame dragging.” The Gravity B Probe will precisely measure changes in the direction of spin of four perfect gyroscopes mounted in the Probe orbiting at 400-mile altitude directly over the poles. The gyroscopes will thus determine how space and time are warped by the presence of Earth’s gravity, and how the Earth's rotation drags space-time around with it. Gravitomagnetism will cause the spinning gyroscopes to wobble as they orbit the Earth. Their spin axes will shift, little by little, until a year or so from now they should point 42 milli-arcseconds away from where they started.
The General Theory of Relativity also accurately predicts that gravitational waves are sent out by any object that undergoes acceleration. Gravity and accelerated motion are indistinguishable. Yet, gravity waves are so faint that only waves from huge events relatively nearby in the Universe could possibly be detected. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiments just getting underway in Washington State and Louisiana each contain two 2.5-mile-long steel tubes built in perfectly straight lines. The mission of LIGO is to detect powerful gravitational waves emitted by, say, a supernova, the collision of black holes, a binary pulsar consisting of two neutron stars orbiting each other, or other massive gravitational event.
Observations of supernovae have recently proved that the rate of expansion of the Universe is accelerating, as though God still had His foot on the gas pedal of the Big Bang. The Hubble Telescope has proved that supernovae are indeed moving away from us at an accelerating rate. This implies the existence of a form of matter or energy that is gravitationally repulsive. Professor Einstein had initially postulated such “cosmological constant,” a term added to his field equation of general relativity: Rμν - ½ gμν R - λgμν = - 8 π G Tμν. But the Princeton cyclist later withdrew the cosmological constant λ after Professor Edwin P. Hubble reported the discovery that galaxies are rushing apart from each other. Today we do know that "dark energy" exists and the cosmos really is stretching out at a rate that continues to accelerate. As a consequence of dark energy, the Universe will continue to expand forever -- unless God were to alter the expansion rate or its acceleration, which would take an astoundingly massive coordinated effort of the Force, but it is not impossible. Such slow-down would have to be effected at precisely the same rate throughout the Universe.
The beginning of the Universe in the Big Bang is no longer in the realm of theoretical possibility. It is observational scientific fact. The new cosmic portrait published by NASA on February 11, 2003 -- capturing the afterglow of the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background -- was taken by scientists using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (“WMAP”) during a sweeping 12-month observation of the entire sky. WMAP measures microwave background from an orbit at the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrangian point, 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) from Earth. These new images are far more detailed than the first observations of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (“COBE”) satellite in 1992 which first explored the microwave afterglow of the Big Bang.
The WMAP data showed that the first generation of stars to shine in the Universe first ignited only 200 million years after the Big Bang, earlier than scientists had expected. In addition, the new WMAP portrait precisely pegs the age of the Universe at 13.7 billion years old, with a small one percent margin of error. This dovetails with the rougher dating of the Universe from the Hubble Telescope’s tracking the changing light output of Cepheid variable stars some 100 million light years away.
The WMAP team confirmed that the Big Bang and Inflation theories continue to hold true. The contents of the Universe include 4% atoms of ordinary matter, 23% of a type of cold dark matter, and 73% of a mysterious dark energy. WMAP results support the existence of a non-zero cosmological constant. The new data also shed light on the nature of the dark energy, which acts as an anti-gravity force within the cosmos. The Universe throughout is splattered with thermonuclear fusion matter-energy exchanges, electromagnetic radiation, black holes of vastly varying sizes, quasars, neutron stars, white dwarfs, dark matter, dark energy, antimatter, nebulas, supernovae, and planets orbiting some of the stars. From this thermonuclear thunderclap and its attendant star dust, Holy God of the Universe, Supreme Being, created all worlds and all life forms that exist throughout the Universe.
What is this dark matter? Dark matter in our galaxy has been inferred because the gravitational field that would be expected from the distribution of stars and other luminous matter does not explain the rotation of the galaxy’s spiral disk. By measuring the motions of stars and gas, astronomers can "weigh" galaxies. In our own solar system, astronomers use the velocity of the Earth around the Sun to calculate the Sun's mass. The Earth moves around the Sun at roughly 60,000 m.p.h.. The Sun orbits the Galactic Center of the Milky Way at 225 kilometers per second, that is, at 486,000 miles per hour. Astronomers can calculate from such velocity and the velocity of other stars the mass of our Galaxy. Big problem -- the mass that astronomers infer for galaxies including our own is roughly ten times larger than the mass that can be associated with observable stars, gas and dust in a galaxy. In other words, the Universe would not work the way it does unless there were a great deal more matter than our telescopes can see. There has to be lots more matter somewhere, and astrophysicists have hypothesized the existence of dark matter to account for the needed matter to account for gravitational behavior and velocities.
Yet, the nature of such “dark matter” has befuddled astronomers and astrophysicists. In fact, such matter is highly compressed matter from dead, collapsed stars, supernovae and outjets at nearly the speed of light from the close vicinity of the event horizon of black holes and remnants of eons-old black holes throughout the galaxies in the Universe. Black holes are big dark matter factories in the Universe, though not the only sources of such matter. Cold Dark Matter is extremely difficult to detect, but astronomers’ ability to detect dark matter has improved and will continue to improve with more NASA, ESA and other observatories placed into deep space, revealing all portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, not just visible light. Superheavy X-particles formed in the early stages of the cosmos account for a considerable amount of Cold Dark Matter. As the Russian Academy of Sciences reports, the decay of these superheavy long-living X-particles appears to trigger high energy cosmic rays throughout the Universe.[iii]
Microwave radiation emanating from the Galactic Center of the Milky Way results from dark matter from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole. The radiation from this region indicates electrons and positrons moving at speeds approaching light speed, as well as the behemoth black hole’s spewing of gamma rays and X-rays as it obliterates surrounding matter, as observed by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Lurking at the core of our own Galaxy is Sagittarius A* (that’s A-star), surrounded within three light years radius by a swarm of 10,000 or more smaller stellar mass black holes and neutron stars in binary systems. Even well beyond this dense region, perhaps millions of black holes and other shrunken stellar remnants of all sizes sink slowly but irreparably towards Death Star, the gravitational glue that holds the galaxy together. This swarm of satellite black holes will eventually be annihilated and digested by A,* further increasing its already behemoth mass at the black Milky Way Core, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process. No wonder radio astronomers at the Very Large Array on New Mexico's Plains of San Agustin recently had a field day picking up “burps” in radio waves of 1-meter wavelength from this core region where Death Star chows down black holes and stellar remnants for snacks without remorse. This supermassive black hole already has a mass exceeding 3 million times that of our sun and continues to grow. It will be a major focus of astrophysicists and radio astronomers in the future.
The central black hole cores of many other galaxies are far larger even than our Milky Way’s Sagittarius A*. Quasar 3C 273 in Virgo, the first quasar discovered and the brightest in magnitude, spurts out jets of energy and matter some 500,000 light-years long!
Black holes throughout the Universe are gravity implosions that function as the gravitational cores or organizers that pull together and assemble massive galaxies in the first place -- like a spinning basketball in a large vat of gooey molasses drags the molasses (the space-time framework including the galaxy’s stars and dark matter) around it. Mmm … Any one for a Milky Way bar?[iv] The larger the black hole galactic core, the larger the central stellar bulge of the galaxy. From the point of view of Creation, black holes pre-date galaxies. The reason is that they helped form them.
Galaxy-genesis begins with one or more black holes, a gravity implosion. God employs gravity implosions to organize the cosmos and create structures in a Universe in which the fabric of space otherwise relentlessly continues to spread out. A galaxy forms out of a large, typically spherical cloud of cold gas, rotating in space. The huge cloud eventually begins to condense of its own mass, assisted by the central black hole. The same condensation of matter on a much smaller scale occurs when individual stars or clusters of stars in a galaxy are formed. Because the cloud was spherical at the time of formation, astronomers observe very old stars distributed in a spherical halo around the outside of the galaxy. At such early times in the creation of a galaxy, these stars consist only of hydrogen and helium gas. The galaxy cloud continues to condense, forming even more stars. If the galaxy cloud is rotating, the spherical shape flattens out into a disc, and the stars form in the shape of the disc as in our Milky Way Galaxy. Some of the oldest giant stars begin to shed their atmospheres and explode in spectacular supernova events. The explosions of these massive stars enrich the gas in the cloud with the heavier elements that only supernovae can form. Without the creation of these heavier elements, Earth would not exist, for there would only be hydrogen and helium gases. Without supernovae, heavier elements like carbon, oxygen and iron – critical for the creation of habitable worlds -- would not exist.
Similarly, within a galaxy, massive stars develop in very dark regions from mini-black holes. Material gets hotter and hotter as the gravity of the dark cores draws it into what become embryonic stars ignited by fusion. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has recently (January 2005) uncovered a hatchery for massive stars in the Trifid Nebula, a giant star-forming cloud of gas and dust located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. The Nebula contains four cold knots or cores of dust. Such cores are incubators where stars are born, and Spitzer discovered 30 embryonic stars in the four cores and dark clouds of the Nebula.
Substantial portions of dark matter also result from neutron stars, old, very cool white dwarfs, and brown dwarfs. A neutron star -- the imploded core of a massive star produced by a supernova from a massive star -- is even more highly compressed than a white dwarf. It has the typical mass of 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, but a radius of only about 5 miles. Unlike a white dwarf, in a neutron star not only the electrons but also neutrons and protons are stiff and lack mobility. Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that generate regular pulses of observable radiation – flashing lighthouses in the Universe. Pulsars were discovered by radio astronomers but have since been observed at optical, X-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths. A neutron star known as a magnetar is a fast-spinning, imploded stellar remnant that creates intense magnetic fields that trigger gamma ray bursts. A huge gamma ray burst from 50,000 light years away, halfway across our Milky Galaxy, recently impacted and altered the shape of Earth’s ionosphere on December 27, 2004, as would a solar flare. Had the originating magnetar been anywhere near to our Solar System, it would have triggered a mass extinction.
A white dwarf that started out as a more normal sized star, is the extremely dense end-state core in the evolution of those stars with masses less than about eight times the mass of our sun. Because the core has approximately the mass of the sun compressed to something the size of the Earth or less, it is around 106 times denser than water (one sugar cube volume's worth of white dwarf has a mass > 1 car). Despite the huge densities and the stiff electrons, the neutrons and protons in a white dwarf still have room to move about freely.
Once a star dies and becomes a white dwarf, its ability to produce nuclear fusion has expired, and it collapses under the force of the star’s gravity, cools, shrinks and fades. Because white dwarfs are the remnant of once luminescent stars, they are primarily made of the highly-compressed "waste" products of the nuclear fusion, primarily carbon and oxygen with traces of other elements. The outer part of a white dwarf consists of helium and hydrogen. It is the tremendous gravitational force associated with these dead, dense stars that stratifies the material within them such that the heaviest elements inhabit the deepest depths in the dead star. The atmospheres of white dwarfs are only about ten meters thick. Their small size makes them especially difficult for astronomers to detect. The Hubble Space Telescope, however, operating from 600 km above Earth’s atmosphere has detected many of these small dead stars in old star clusters called globular clusters. Many more will be found in coming years.
Brown Dwarfs are another source of dark matter. When the mass of a star is less than 1/20th of our sun, its core is not hot enough to fuse either hydrogen or deuterium, so it shines dimly only by virtue of the heat and energy of its gravitational contraction. These dim objects, intermediate in size between stars and gas planets such as Jupiter, are not luminous enough to be directly detectable by our telescopes. Brown Dwarfs and similar objects have been nicknamed MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects) by astronomers. MACHOs are detectable by gravitational lensing experiments. The long and short of it is that ordinary, baryonic matter does not make up most of the mass of the Universe, only 4% of it.
God acted with deep purpose in the Big Bang. The initial dense fireball was so violently white-hot, 100 million trillion trillion degrees, because this level of energy was needed to trigger the initial fusion reactions that would eventually lead to lighting up the stars in the Universe 200 million years later. This is when the Lord God turned on the lights in the Universe! Fusion would generate the heavier elements that are the cornerstone of matter as we know it and, much later, lead to the formation of complex life forms.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1. God created heaven. That is the abode of God and his holy angels who ferry us across the River Styx when our bodies give out and then care for us in the Next World. God much later created the physical Universe, 13.7 billion years ago, with life and the eventual creation of habitable worlds, complex life forms and rational beings in mind. Father created our Solar System and the Earth when the Universe was already 9.16 billion years old. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness.” Genesis 1:3-4.
One of the most startling discoveries of the WMAP team is that the temperature of the Big Bang microwave background radiation is identical, no matter in what direction of the early Universe -- evidence that the Universe, on a macro level (taking cubes of, say, 500 million light-years on a side), is uniform and homogeneous throughout its vast 78 billion light year expanse. If we could see the Big Bang microwaves with our eyes, the entire sky would glow with a uniform brightness in every direction no matter where in the sky you looked. The observations of the cosmic background radiation show that the Universe was astonishingly uniform in temperature (to one part in 100,000) by the age of 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Such uniformity of the microwave background radiation throughout the entire cosmos is a compelling reason to interpret the background radiation as heat from the Big Bang. The Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field image also shows this basic macro-uniformity in the protogalaxies billions of years ago. How could this uniformity among different regions of the Universe be established when the Universe evolved so quickly such that there was no time for the uniformity of temperature and density in all parts of the embryonic Universe to be established and where information cannot travel faster than the speed of light? (I wonder, are there folks on the other side of the Universe asking these same questions?) How could different regions of the cosmos whose horizons have always been separate, and could never have interacted or influenced each other, have nearly identical temperatures? Among astrophysicists, this question is known as the “horizon problem.”
The reason that this is a puzzle is because this is a puzzle.
No scientist has adequately explained how this could be, from the laws of physics alone. Inflationary cosmology takes a nice stab at the question by postulating gravity for a brief instant very early on as an explosive, repulsive force. But even assuming that in the initial supercondensed pre-inflation state or during the brief inflation episode that regions could communicate with each other, there simply was not enough time to have any effective communication. Theorists are groping in the dark in struggling to explain the uniformity of the cosmos today from what happened a split second after the Big Bang.
This uniformity of background radiation would not have been the case had the Big Bang resulted from a conventional explosion such as from a stick of dynamite or a nuclear atmospheric test on some abandoned South Pacific atoll. This uniformity is how Supreme Creator pictured the Big Bang fireball and controlled its expansion and development, with formation of galaxies and habitable worlds in store down the line. Rather, the true answer to the horizon problem is this: it was Spirit that was in communication with itself -- not the matter and energy in far-flung regions of the cosmos interacting. The Big Bang was an energy fireball with a purpose. Imagine a thinking fireball, as it were, constantly being molded and shaped. Every aspect of the fireball and its expansion was infused with this purpose, this plan, this objective. The Big Bang always had “in mind” what it was to be. The Big Bang was in this sense alive!
Take a look at the Hubble Deep Field and Ultra Deep Field portrayed on the cover of this book; the Ring Galaxy where another galaxy plunged through its disk and carved out a smoke ring; the Eagle Nebula dubbed the “Pillars of Creation,” the Starburst Ring (NGC 4314); two galaxies colliding (NGC 2207 and IC2163); the Cartwheel Galaxy; or the Sombrero Galaxy. See the Helix Nebula where the nebula’s central star has ejected its outer layers. View the graceful spiral arms of M81, a galaxy in Ursa Major. Observe N49, the tattered remains of a massive exploded star with scattered brilliant filaments. Take a look at antimatter fountains where antimatter electrons (positrons) collide with normal negatively charged electrons, or the Bug Nebula flaring out from a hot young star, or supernova remnant EO102-72 displaying the anatomy of an exploded star with high-energy electrons swirling in magnetic field lines, or the black hole binary system XTE J1118+480, or the black hole with the mass of 30 million suns at the center of the Andromeda galaxy’s core, or the Pencil Nebula (NGC 2736), a part of the vast Vela supernova remnant -- and who could not be overwhelmed by the sheer magnificence and beauty of the cosmos?
Some people believe that this stunning magnificence just popped up on its own. Other people just throw up their hands and say they do not know. Where lies the truth? The author’s promise is that by the end of this book, the reader will be in a position to formulate his or her own reasoned answer.
God delights in creating. God delights in diversification within Creation. God is pleased when the rational beings that He has created choose the path of righteousness, compassion and justice of their own free will, even when it is not to their personal advantage. War is endemic only to the most primitive and backwards civilizations in the Universe. Most civilizations of intelligent beings have developed mechanisms to resolve conflicts without wars in which everyone is the loser. Real and meaningful peace on Earth is achievable. But the human race is on the wrong track, and repeats over and over again the mistakes of the past. War, death and famine are not the “Will of God.” Genocide, terrorism, “ethnic cleansing,” torture, and abuse of children, to name but a few, are cancers and are never, and can never, be justified under any circumstances whatsoever. It is sacrilege that such evil is committed invoking the name of the Divinity.
“Thou shalt not kill,” the Lord commanded in His Ten Commandments. Exodus 20:13. Military action against military targets with sharply focused military objectives to prevent an imminent greater evil may at times be argued on grounds of necessity as during World War II -- but never, never deliberately or indiscriminately targeting civilians. Never. All men and women of good will, turn your hearts to God, and pray that these and other scourges will be removed from our civilization in all their forms. They are blotches on human civilization, and render the human race unworthy to join the wider community of rational beings in the Universe.
The Galaxies formed as much smaller protogalaxies about 200 million years (that’s 13.5 billion years ago) after the Big Bang because that is how God of the Universe imagined or visualized them and evolved them over enormous stretches of time out of the Big Bang inflating filaments. Galaxies in all their myriad shapes and designs, typically spiral or elliptical, are the manners in which God organized matter-energy in the Universe. If the Universe is ever expanding outwards, how could galaxies have formed after the Big Bang? Gravitational force? Then why is the Universe’s expansion accelerating and why are galaxies (other than galaxy clusters) moving apart from each other? It may be that acceleration will eventually be slowed, but this would take a further act of God. Should not gravity be pulling the Universe back together towards ground zero where it all began? Astrophysicists really do not have a satisfactory explanation for the organization and design of the Universe from the laws of physics alone. But the remarkable scientific observatories in space are educating us more and more each day about the true nature of the cosmos. Science and discovery should always be taught and pursued and scientific theories supported or debated in a dialectic aimed at reaching the truth.
The truth is that there is an Organizing Principle in the Universe. This Organizing Principle is God of the Universe, Supreme Being Creator of all that is seen and all that is unseen. That is how the Big Bang remnants organized into galaxies comprised of stars because God pictured them as such in the continuing Big Bang explosion known as the Universe. The Universe has expanded and developed in an organized manner. The Hubble or other astronomical photographs are beautiful to look at because the Universe was designed. It is not just happenstance.
These days practically everyone knows that the nine planets orbit our yellow sun, though in Galileo’s day, that idea was still considered heretical by some. Misguided clergy viewed it as a threat to the flock’s faith in God. But how can Truth be a threat? These principles of organization hold true throughout the farthest reaches of the Universe -- moons orbit planets, planetary bodies orbit stars, and stars typically orbit the galactic center of their respective galaxies. And galaxies continue to spread out from each other, forever in motion. This is not to say that each detail in the Universe has been sculpted by God. It has not. Much of the Universe remains “rough” creation yet unmolded, like clay in the hands of the Divine Picasso.
Consider this. Imagine a test explosion in the air that we view behind proper bunkers. Do particles begin to cohere and form larger objects? Of course not. Lest your skepticism dissuade you, perhaps suggesting that Earth’s gravity threw off your experiment, try it again way out in outer space, say, with a nuclear blast millions of miles away from Earth. Particles from the blast would continue to travel away from the point of explosion, and they would not cohere to form larger objects. No matter how large a man-made explosion, the same would be true. Try as hard as you may, you would never be able to create even a small boulder from an explosion in space from the glue of gravity, much less a planet. Professor Isaac Newton taught us that gravity is proportional to the product of the masses of the two objects and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The gravitational force between objects is relatively feeble, however. No scientist, physicist, mathematician, astronomer has even begun to scratch the surface.
Consider, further, the dazzling rings of Saturn. Other gas giants Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus possess wispy rings but nothing like Saturn’s bright entrancing rings. This stunning astronomical sight was first observed by Professor Galileo Galilei, Chief Mathematician of the University of Padua, in the summer of 1610 using a 20-powered telescope he had built the prior year, improving on this optical instrument that had developed in the Netherlands. Saturn received extra attention from the Force, making our Solar System one of the most spectacular in the entire Universe. The Cassini spacecraft that began orbiting Saturn in July 2004 reveals that there are thousands of concentric rings comprised of objects ranging in size from specks of dust to ice cubes to huge boulders. They have been circling Saturn for at least 100 million years, and they remain bright and shiny. But the rings will remain there and not cohere to form another Titan, because, as the author respectfully submits, that is how God created and pictured Saturn over time as the planet that we observe today – an enchanting ringed planet of incredible colors and beauty to gaze upon, virtually a planetary system in its own right with more than 30 moons, none of which harbor life. It takes more to form a planet or a moon than an orbiting accretion disk, and these rings are a case in point. One cannot but chuckle at how Saturn and its rings throw the anticreationists off balance. Was not gravity supposed to stick these rings together to form a moon? Perhaps another 4 or 5 billion years might do the trick?
The Organizing Principle is also apparent with the Moon. The Moon orbits the Earth in 27.322 days. Consider that the Moon rotates on its axis in precisely the same period of time – perfectly synchronous rotation. What were the chances of that? Because the rotation period and the orbital period of the Moon are exactly the same, Earth-bound observers (that is, everybody except for our brave Apollo astronauts!) can never see the 'far-side' of the Moon with their own eyes. This is why the Moon always keeps one side facing Earth and the far side always facing away. Is the Moon’s perfectly synchronous rotation just coincidence? Hardly so. It was designed that way. The Moon has a nearly perfectly circular orbit (e=0.05)[v] which is tilted about 5° to the plane of the Earth's orbit. Contrast this with the elliptical path that the planets follow around the sun. An elliptical Moon orbit, however, would have wreaked havoc on Earth’s tides and climates. Its distance from the Earth varies only between 221,000 and 253,000 miles each month. The Moon’s surface is charcoal gray and sandy with extremely fine soil. This powdery blanket is known as the lunar regolith. The regolith is thin, from about 2 meters on the young maria to about 20 meters on the older moonscape in the highland regions. These dark areas or maria (Latin, meaning seas) are known as such because the Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei, who made the first telescopic observations of the Moon in 1610, believed they might be oceans. That is why they are still called ‘seas.’
Fewer people are aware that our sun with its entire planetary system orbits the Galactic Center of our Milky Way Galaxy, traveling at 486,000 miles per hour, with each orbit running about 226 million years.[vi] In its entire history, our sun has completed 20 orbits of the Galactic Center and is now on its 21st orbit. The Universe is not haphazard. Stars and planets, though, begin with “rough” Creation. Consider the data and photographs streaming back from the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, of which this author cannot get enough. On Mars, one sees majestic panoramas, deep craters, dazzling dunes, mounds of Martian terrain, landslides within craters, outcrops, hills and mountains, different shaped rocks and boulders … and even tiny “blueberries.” (Anyone for Wheaties?) Actually, the large quantities of hematite and hematite “blueberries” at the Opportunity landing site on Mars indicate its water was once abundant at that rover site, though acidic, salty and lasting only for a few thousand years. Opportunity also discovered minerals such as jarosite that only form in the presence of water. Similar mineral deposits have been found in Valles Marineris on Mars, much larger than our Grand Canyon. Pictures of Valles Marineris and other Martian sites suggest that they were carved out long ago by flowing water.
Still, no palm trees. Not even so much as a fossil of a long dead jellyfish, sponge or trilobite from the vast seas that once submerged the Martian lowlands. No seashells. Why not? Mars, like all other planets and moons in our sun system other than Earth, is “rough” Creation. A great deal more intervention from God is needed to create a habitable planet. Notwithstanding the existence of naturally formed amino acids (which were replicated by the Miller-Urey experiments), living planets and biodiversity do not just pop up on their own. Sorry, folks. Within our sun system, it will eventually be shown by the end of this 21st century, if not sooner, that Earth is the only body that contains complex life -- putting aside amino acids or nanobes from amino acids, that exist in space and are at times found on meteorites and on Mars. Amino acids or nanobes are not encompassed within ‘complex life forms.’ The hypothesis that the presence of hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen, together with potassium, calcium, iron and magnesium, will produce complex life on their own under proper climatic conditions and sufficient time, is unsubstantiated and happens to be wrong.
Are plant and life forms the same throughout the Universe? No. God takes great delight in diversification and tailoring life forms to specific conditions, atmospheres and climates. Must all life systems be oxygen-based? No. But oxygen expedites a complex organism’s energy conversion. Oxygen-scare environments can still harbor life forms, but oxygen-poor worlds result in less complex and less intelligent life forms.
In the Big Bang, at one and the same stroke, God simultaneously created the precursors of particled matter-energy and space-time, forever and relentlessly expanding outwards at a rate, the Hubble Constant (not actually constant), used to determine the age of the Universe. Georges Lemaître is generally recognized as the "father" of the expanding universe cosmology back in 1931, and WMAP, COBE and other satellites show that he was right. Astronomers early in the 20th century first noticed that galaxies are receding from us by observing their redshifted galactic light. The light from the farthest galaxies are redshifted the most. This redshift effect is similar to a Doppler effect as when the frequency of a siren lowers in pitch as the siren moves away from us, but redshift of galactic light results from the expansion of space, not movement through space as with the Doppler effect.
Over billions and billions of years, God evolved the Universe into what astronomers on Earth and other worlds can observe today. The Universe is forever expanding outwards, making the distance between galaxies greater and greater, and thus rendering travel between worlds more and more difficult. Systems that are gravitationally bound -- such as galaxies, clusters of galaxies or our sun system with its nine orbiting planets -- are not subject to Hubble's law and do not themselves expand. That means that our Solar System itself is not increasing in size. The laws of gravity keep it in the shape that it is in. On a cosmological level, how is it that while the cosmos is ever-expanding like a giant balloon being filled with helium, the galaxies, star systems and planetary systems themselves are not expanding? If every particle of matter was moving away from every other particle of matter, we could say that the entire fabric of space within the Universe is uniformly expanding. But that is not what appears to be happening.
Instead, these propositions are true: (1) galaxies (other than clusters of galaxies held intact by gravity) are receding from each other as the space between the galaxies is stretching out; (2) the cosmos itself is expanding and expanding uniformly; (3) the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster is its velocity receding from Earth (“recession velocity”) such that v = Hd where v is recession velocity of a galaxy, d is the distance of the galaxy from Earth and H is the Hubble Constant;[vii] (4) beyond a certain distance (the “Hubble distance” or about 14 billion light years), the recession velocity exceeds the speed of light because recession velocity is caused by the expansion of the fabric of space (the expanding balloon) -- not by the far-off galaxy’s travel through space. Is there space-time beyond the boundaries of the cosmos into which the cosmos can expand? No. The expanding cosmos drags space-time with it, so that there is no “beyond.” The cosmos is it – it comprises the entirety of Creation.
Recently astronomers have studied supernovae (particularly utilizing the Hubble Space Telescope) to measure the universal expansion, and these observations actually prove that the universal expansion is accelerating. The speed of light in space, 186,282.4 miles per second, remains a constant and a universal speed limit throughout the Universe, and no physical object can travel faster through space than light. Nothing can outrun a beam of light. Indeed, Professor Einstein’s special theory of relativity correctly taught us that light travels at 670 million miles per hour through space regardless of benchmarks. (Special relativity applies only to objects traveling through space, not the expansion of space; recession velocity of the farthest galaxies can exceed the speed of light because their velocity results from the stretching of space.) That is, if you were traveling at 100 million miles per hour on a spacecraft and you shined a light beam ahead of you, that beam of light would still be traveling at 670 million m.p.h. per hour, not 770 million m.p.h.. Even if our human civilization could somehow develop spacecraft approaching the speed of light, virtually the entire Universe would still remain entirely unreachable by men and women of our civilization. The same, of course, is true of all other civilizations inhabiting the Universe. Nothing in the Universe, no civilization in the Universe, no matter where you go, can travel above light speed.
Could God permit space travel at warp speeds about the light speed constant? Yes. The Universe is not set in stone. The Universe consists entirely of created stuff -- filaments of the physical world blown through the inflating fabric of space-time by the Big Bang explosion. It is a viable, living and malleable thing. To whet the appetite, keep in mind that massive bodies like stars or groups of stars or galaxies cause the fabric of space to warp, like a child jumping on a very flexible trampoline. The more massive the object, the greater the warp of space-time. Might warp speed some day be achievable if space travelers could manage to get off the curved plane of the trampoline and travel directly from one point to another?
Might the massive gravitational field of a white dwarf or other gravity implosion somehow be harnessed to vault spacecraft through the space-time fabric at warp speeds? Too big a project for us -- but not too big a project for God, though still a mighty hefty one given the laws of physics that have held sway for nearly 14 billion years. Oh, well, just a friendly suggestion. Allowing for warp speeds would foster communications and travel between worlds in a Universe that continues to expand, and this would be a good thing for everyone.
From the point of view of mankind, the Universe is infinite. From the point of view of God, the Universe is finite. This latter proposition means, first, that the Universe is created, and God can always create more Universe or create worlds differently if He chooses, but at last count it seemed to be big enough to make everybody happy. The Universe is at least 78 billion light years across, according to WMAP. Creation of the physical world is a continuing process, not just a split second of time job. Second, from God’s perspective, the Universe does have a size, beyond which there is neither space nor time, relentlessly expanding outwards and thereby each instant of time creating more Universe and more space-time. This relentless expansion from the Big Bang explosion by itself is a continuing act of Creation. Like space, time is navigable. Time like energy comes in discrete lumps, quanta or pulses. Nothing is carved in stone for God Almighty of the Universe, though it can seem that way to us. Matter does not necessarily have to be in the states in which it is found in the Universe. Matter is flux. It can be altered this way or that by Spirit, but only in limited ways.
Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Center has shown that a proton consists of two up-quarks and a down-quark; a neutron consists of two down-quarks and an up-quark. The term ‘quark’ is from this passage in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (2:4:383):

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn't un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark
And you think you're cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark
That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!


Matter is divisible into three families of matter particles: first family -- electrons, electron-neutrinos, up-quarks, down-quarks; second family -- muons, muon-neutrinos, charm and strange quarks; and third family -- tau, tau-neutrinos, and top and bottom quarks.[viii] As “string theory” of physics correctly holds, each of these basic particles of matter in turn is a single string or one-dimensional filament, and all strings comprising the basic particles of matter are identical but vibrate differently and in different patterns. The key point, however, is that matter does not necessarily have to be structured in this fashion. It all depended and continues to depend on God’s purpose, what He wills to do, what the objective is. It is not possible to divorce God’s purpose from the physical world. This was the way that the Universe was created, but it was not the only way that it could have been created.
Before the Big Bang, the proposition was true that there was no “room” for matter in the Universe. The reason is that physical space-time did not yet exist, although there could have been some “test runs” on a small scale. Will the Universe reach a point of stasis and then begin to contract (the “Big Crunch”) as astrophysicists like Professor Stephen Hawking query?[ix] No.
Was there time before time in the physical world (i.e., creation of the Universe)? Yes. There was time before physical time because this is not the only Universe (but the only physical one). There is another World of which the Holy Scripture teaches, and God’s world does not depend on physical matter or atoms and molecules in the slightest. God measures time within the Universe differently from mankind, as should be evident even from the fact that mankind has existed only 150,000 years in a 13.7 billion year old Universe. We are still one-second-old infants in the Universe. God instead measures time in terms of eons and epochs across the nearly 14 billion years of the Universe’s existence, and there is a great divide pre-Creation and post-Creation.
It is possible to envisage a state of affairs where space, time, matter and energy are absent. This would be the "Pre-Big Bang Epoch" (PBBE). Our minds are tempted to think of the PBBE as a perfectly empty starless night sky and to imagine such totally black void as something because a black void is empty space and, after all, empty space is something. But the void image is a flawed visualization. The Pre-Big Bang Epoch as a definite descriptive phrase can only have meaning from a different vantage, not from the vantage of the not-yet-existent universe. In the PBBE, there is no physical universe, no creation, no physical world, no space, no time and no energy. Not even so much as a single wandering virtually massless neutrino.
It follows that the PBBE could only exist in God's world. And it did so exist.

[i] In 1981, Professor Alan H. Guth formally proposed “cosmic inflation,” the theory that the Universe at its inception passed through a phase of spectacularly rapid exponential expansion, driven by a negative vacuum energy density (positive vacuum pressure). A handful of scientists in the United States and the former Soviet Union have refined Guth’s idea, including Russian cosmologist Andrei Linde, Paul Steinhardt and Andreas Albrecht.

[ii] CERN Press Release, “Measurements at CERN Help to Re-evaluate the Element of Life,” January 13, 2005; Nature Vol. 433, Issue 7022, pp 136-139.

[iii] V. Kuzmin and I. Tkachev, “Matter Creation via Vacuum Fluctuations in the Early Universe and Observed Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Ray Events,” arXiv:hep-ph/9809547 v1 (Sept. 28, 1998).

[iv] The center of the Milky Way Bar is a slab of chocolate malt-flavored sweetened egg whites, called nougat, which is topped with a layer of gooey caramel.

[v] A circle has one diameter. But an ellipse has diameters of different lengths. The ratio of the major axis over the minor axis determines the eccentricity (e) of the ellipse. Circles have e=0, and stretched-out ellipses have an eccentricity nearly equal to 1.

[vi] Paul Recer, Associated Press, “Radio astronomers measure sun's orbit around Milky Way,” June 1, 1999.

[vii] The Hubble Constant is expressed in units of "kilometers per second, per Megaparsec." One parsec is a unit of distance equal to 3.2 light years, and a Megaparsec is a million times this, or about 3.2 million light years. The Hubble Constant says that for every 3.2 million light years into space, the galaxy there appears to be receding from Earth at a rate of Ho kilometers per second. If Ho is 100, then the objects appear to recede at 100 km/second for every 3.2 million light years out into space. If Ho is 50, then you have to look about 6.4 million light years out into space for the same 100 km/second recessional velocity.

[viii] Brian R. Green, The Elegant Universe 2003 ed., First Vintage Books.

[ix] S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988, rev.1996, Bantam Books.