Cosmic Exaggeration

Irritating, that's what its is. In this BBC article the author writes:

The astronomers were lucky enough to catch the collision just 100 million years after it occurred - the blink of an eye in cosmic time.

Our universe is about 13.7 billion years old and that would make 100 million years 1/137 or 0.0073 of the age of the universe - the blink of an eye?

To contrast this a blink of the eye takes say 0.4 seconds. Let's assume that the average person lives to say 80 years, that would mean that a blink would be 0.00000000016 of a lifetime. Now we don't really know how long the universe will be around for, so let's just assume that we map one lifetime over the age of the universe to date.

So what would a cosmic blink be?

2.2 years!



In fact, I'm always amazed to what extent the universe has developed when you consider how long cosmic events take.

Let me give you an example:
Many of the heavier elements both in and around us can only be created inside stars or as a result of supernovae (exploding stars). The age of our Sun is 4.5 billion years so our Sun has been around for about a third of the time that the universe has been in existence! That doesn't seem to leave much time for the universe to cool down after the Big Bang, sort itself out ... create a star, let the star burn for a while ... or maybe a long while, blow up the star, allow the debris to cool, gather and form a star (do this a few times) ... debris eventually gathers and our Sun forms. But the universe has only got 9.2 billion years to do this, quite a feat.

Furthermore, our Sun is about half way through its life expectancy of 10 billion years. So we couldn't quite fit the full lifetime of our Sun into the available time before our Sun was created. That means that we can pretty much say that the matter in our solar system has never existed in a star system with a star with the same mass or smaller than ours.

But what are the most common stars in the universe? Stars of our mass or smaller - there are more piddly stars than massive stars.

The truth is that stars of 15 times the mass of our Sun would have a lifetime of only 10 million years and it is stars with a mass over 11 times the mass of our Sun that will go supernova. So in our 'blink of an eye' scale, supernova would be sort of a monthly event - you can kind of see how it all fits together and that there is actually enough time.

So it all fits neatly together, there is enough time and we don't need 'The Creation' to make it work - amazing! As for 'a blink of an eye' ... hmmmph!