Afternoon all, I found these posts after googleing 'gravitational lag'
I am by no means anywhere near as knowledgeable as most users who posted here are on this subject - but my mind tends to throw random things at me that just make me wonder...
The reason I ended up here is two fold, firstly I love the stars and thinking about the mind boggling distances and time frames involved. But that got me thinking about where these stars are actually located now, has anyone actually plotted what are galaxy actually looks like right now? Ok obviously we have not plotted every star, rock and cloud, but based on the substantial data we do have? Be interesting to see a virtualisation of our sky if light traveled instantly.
That then got me onto Gravitational Lag, and reading this post was brilliant thanks for all the time you guys must have spent getting this written for guys like me to read. My thoughts went from what is everything doing now - to how do we actually work out where everything is, as surely there must be a lag involved with the gravitational pulls experienced across the wide expanse that is a galaxy? There must be a huge 'wobble' going on, just very slowly and across vast distances.
Then I got thinking about how the universe is still expanding - and accelerating and we are not sure why (dark matter / energy?) Could it be that the lag involved in various forces (gravity, electro etc) has a part in this, that what we are 'seeing' is so out of context with what is 'really' happening we are being fooled into thinking most of the universe is invisible...?
There we go, rant done, sorry if I have hijacked a thread - feel free to move.
Dave
