Answer 1:
Well, that depends on what kind of problem
you're setting up. From your wording, it sounds
like this is a problem on Newtonian gravity, and
you're ignoring things like dark matter and dark
energy. In that case, it's just a matter of
using Newton's law of gravity: the force between
two objects with masses m1 and
m2 is
F = G*m1*m2/r2,
where r is the distance between them. From the
force, you can calculate the acceleration (and
since gravity's attractive, you know that the
acceleration of each galaxy points towards the
other one).
Of course, in the actual universe, things can
get a lot more complicated. As you may know,
the universe started with the Big Bang, and has
been expanding ever since. In fact, the rate of
expansion of the universe is increasing, so the
universe is expanding faster and faster as time
goes on (we call whatever is causing this
expansion "dark energy"). That means that
without the presence of external forces,
everything in the universe is accelerating away
from everything else. In the case of, say, two
galaxies, there's the gravitational attraction
that tries to make the galaxies move closer to
each other, and the expansion of the universe
that tries to pull them apart. To figure out
what their relative acceleration is, you'd need
to know how strong the dark energy is that's
pulling them apart, and how strongly gravity's
trying to pull them together. This is very
complicated to calculate; in practice, this
question is generally answered by the
observations of astronomers.
|
Answer 3:
Hmm, well, you need to know a couple of other
things. First off, you would need to know the
distance between the two galaxies, and second,
you would need to know the value of what I'm
going to call the "cosmological repulsive force"
over that distance.
The first of these, the distance, is
straightforward: using Newton's theory of
gravity, which is perfectly accurate for
calculating the gravitational attraction of two
galaxies, the force between them would be equal
to the product of their masses (thus, about 2 x
1084 kg2) divided by the
square of the distance between them. You need
that distance.
The second property, the cosmological
repulsive force, is harder to quantify, because
it is not currently understood physically.
Albert Einstein's field equations that describe
gravity under general relativity include the
possibility of a cosmological constant, which
would be a universal, repulsive, gravitational
force that causes space itself to expand a
constant rate, which would manifest on matter in
space as an acceleration that scales linearly
with distance. Most physicists, including
Einstein himself, considered this an inelegant
explanation for the universe, and dropped it
immediately when Hubble discovered that the
universe is expanding, predicting instead that
the universe is merely coasting on its outward
momentum from an explosive event (the Big Bang)
in the distant past. However, more recent
observations of the speed of galaxies moving
away from us indicate that the universe is not
only expanding, but that the rate of expansion
is *accelerating*, indicating that there *is*
some kind of repulsive gravitational interaction
that scales with distance, much like Einstein's
cosmological constant. The most popular theory
right now is that there is a form of vacuum
energy known as "dark energy" or "quintessence"
that exerts this repulsive force, but what the
nature of this dark energy is, why it exists,
and what its properties are is still a matter of
speculation. The amount of it in the universe
may or may not be constant - although we do, of
course, know that the universe must have
accelerated violently during the Big Bang
itself, and is not accelerating at nearly that
rate now (if it were, the repulsive interaction
would be strong enough to tear atoms apart, and
matter as we know it would not exist).
The expansion rate of the universe itself
appears to be broadly constant, scaling linearly
with distance as predicted by Einstein's
theories, but is slowly accelerating. I don't
know the rate of acceleration, but the current
expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, is
approximately 70 km/second * megaparsec, that
is, for every megaparsec two galaxies are apart
(about 4.8 million light years), the space
containing those two galaxies will be moving
apart at 70 km/second. So, for example, if two
galaxies are ten magaparsecs apart, then they
will be moving apart at 700 km/second, assuming
no momentum or other forces relative to each-
other.
It should also be pointed out that the
expansion of the universe is a product of space
itself, not the movement of matter within space.
Matter and energy within space cannot move
faster than light, but space can do whatever it
wants. This means that, beyond about sixteen
billion light years' distance, two galaxies will
be moving apart faster than the speed of light.
This also means that light emitted by one galaxy
will never reach the other - a cosmological
event horizon exists between them.
Click Here to return to the search form.
|