> Some cosmologists prefer the term "gnaB giB" to "Big Crunch". Hehe...good one. Who says they have no sense of humor? :-) > The missing mass is not neccessarily black holes. It could be > "dark matter" in the form of dust & gas between galaxies, or > neutrinos (if they have a mass), instead. Over billions of years, wouldn't most free-floating dust have been attracted to some heavy object by now? I know there are still a lot of large bodies such as comets, meteorites, asteroids (though I doubt the existence of the hypothetical "Oort Cloud"). I don't know, it just seems that after so much time, most small bodies, especially dust and what not, would have accumulated into larger objects, just as the stars and planets did. Of course, colliding celestial objects would produce a lot of dust and what not, but still...makes me wonder. > Most cosmologists seem to think that the universe expansion > should be critical i.e. the mass should be just sufficient to brake > the expansion to zero after infinite time. In that case, the ratio of > missing mass to visible mass is about 8 to 1. If the missing mass > ratio is more than twice this amount, the gnaB giB should already > have occurred! Interesting. I can see that if there were indeed much more mass, then the universe would be likely to be compressing rather than expanding by now. As for the missing mass, if I recall, the approximate age of the universe and the rate of expansion would seem to indicate that even given large amounts of dark matter, there will not be any "gnaB giB". > How's the Federal Bureau of Idiocy? Still got all my stuff. Sigh...I did get a temporary computer, and my work loaned me a laptop, so maybe I can start working on primes again. I mentioned to my current boss that we might as well have our backup servers crunching prime numbers, and he actually seemed amenable to that idea. Of course, THIS TIME, I'll be sure to ask EVERYONE!!! :-)
