Invisible and intangible! What mysterious power drives the sun, moon and stars to move endlessly?

Someone asked: Celestial bodies and stars neither emit fire nor smoke, and have neither rotors nor axles. What power do they rely on to move and change in the universe? This is an ordinary person's curiosity, and it is also the power that drives humans to continue to explore and move forward from ignorance to civilization. In fact, once people go to elementary school and middle school, they should have an answer to this question.

Because modern physics has long answered this question, that is gravity. Gravity is the basic power that drives the entire universe to move. Gravity is the basic property of matter. As long as there is mass, from a speck of dust or an atom to a planet, a galaxy, or a galaxy cluster, there is gravity. It is gravity that keeps all matter together.

Newton's discovery of universal gravitation was the first leap forward in human understanding of gravity. Newton's universal gravitation expression is: gravity F = GMm/r^2, which means that the magnitude of gravity is equal to the gravitational constant G, the product of the size of the two objects M and m that interact with gravity, divided by the square of the distance between them. The gravitational constant G was verified by Cavendish in 1789 through the torsion balance experiment he invented. The exact value is ≈6.67*10^-11 (N·m^2/kg^2).

This is the gravitational force when the center of mass of two 1 kg objects is 1 meter apart. With this gravitational constant, Cavendish accurately calculated that the mass of the earth is approximately equal to 6*10^24kg, and is therefore considered by the world to be the first person to weigh the mass of the earth.

Due to the existence of universal gravitation, all matter has a tendency to attract and move closer to each other, so the entire universe is "moving". In the process of matter attracting and moving closer to each other, since the magnitude of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, the gravity exerted on matter at different distances is unbalanced, which will lead to an imbalance in the process of matter attracting each other, various displacements and rotations, and eventually a tendency to rotate around each other.

This is how a star is formed. The nebula dust gradually gathers together in the process of mutual attraction. The uneven contraction causes the entire dust material to rotate. The tighter the contraction, the faster the rotation. The angular momentum drives the formation of the axis. The centrifugal force causes the contracting nebula to form a disk, forming a protoplanetary disk. Eventually, the core part condenses into a star, the planetesimals of the planetary disk condense into planets, and the remaining dregs form asteroids, comets, and dust.

In this way, a galaxy gradually forms a flat disk, and as galaxies continue to merge, they will eventually become a huge elliptical galaxy.

Einstein's general theory of relativity further analyzed the nature of gravity and found that gravity is essentially caused by the disturbance of mass on space-time. Any object with mass will cause disturbance to the surrounding space-time, just like throwing a stone into the water, or putting a few iron balls on a taut bed sheet. The thrown stone or iron ball will compress the water or bed sheet, causing ripples and depressions. This is the space-time vortex or trap. When two objects with mass approach each other, they will tend to fall into each other's vortex or trap, showing the phenomenon of mutual attraction.

The more massive the object, the larger and deeper the vortex or trap it forms. Relatively small objects seem to be attracted by the large object and fall into its vortex or trap.

Einstein's field theory and its formulas did not negate Newton's theory of universal gravitation. They only made it more precise by correcting it, thus solving some unexplained phenomena in celestial observations, such as the precession of Mercury. It dispelled a huge dark cloud hanging over physics and became the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century.

With the continuous in-depth discovery and research in astrophysics, people have discovered new problems. According to the theory of cosmic expansion, the observed cosmic phenomena are different from the theory of gravity. If calculated based on the law of universal gravitation, the gravity of the visible matter in the galaxy cluster is completely incapable of pulling the galaxies together. According to the dispersion of galaxy motion, they should have fallen apart long ago, but they are still gathered together. What is the reason?

Observational calculations have found that the mass of the gravitational force that forms galaxy clusters is far greater than the total mass of visible matter. Therefore, there must be some invisible matter in the galaxies, and this matter accounts for the majority of the mass of galaxies and galaxy clusters. Therefore, scientists have proposed the dark matter and dark energy hypothesis.

After nearly a hundred years of observation and research, the current mainstream theory holds that observable matter only accounts for about 5% of the total mass and energy of the universe, while unobservable mass and energy accounts for 95% of the total mass and energy of the universe. Visible matter, such as stars, galaxies, and nebula dust, only accounts for 4.9% of the total mass of the universe, while dark matter accounts for 26.8% and dark energy accounts for 68.3%.

That is to say, excluding dark energy, the proportion of total matter in the universe is: the visible part that emits light accounts for only about 15%, and the invisible part that does not emit light accounts for 85%. These invisible parts are almost uncharged and do not participate in electromagnetic interactions, that is, they do not interact with photons, so they cannot be observed at all, but they have mass and play a major gravitational role in the formation and maintenance of celestial bodies and galaxies.

Scientists have been trying to figure out what dark matter is. When they discovered the existence of neutrinos, they thought that this might be dark matter. Because neutrinos hardly interact with photons, countless neutrinos pass through all matter, including the earth, every moment. Even trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies every second, but people don't feel it at all.

But despite the large number of neutrinos, they only account for 0.001% of the total mass-energy in the universe. Even if they are really a type of dark matter, they cannot support the gravity that determines the life and death of the universe. Scientists have racked their brains to come up with a bunch of candidate particles, such as axions and WIMPs, which have challenged the model of elementary particles. But what exactly is dark matter? There is still no answer.

The exploration continues. The current mainstream theory holds that the past, present and future of our universe all depend on the contest between dark matter and dark energy. The power of dark matter is to maintain the existing universe through gravity, while dark energy causes the universe to continue to expand through thrust. The final destination of the universe will be a big rip or a big collapse. It depends on who will win.

This is the main reason why various celestial bodies in our universe are constantly moving, surging and changing. But fundamentally speaking, there is another more primitive driving force, which is the vacuum zero-point energy. Even in the absolute vacuum before the birth of the universe, it is full of huge energy. This energy randomly perturbs in the form of quantum vacuum, and constantly appears and annihilates each other in the form of virtual particle pairs.

But this quantum random disturbance is not perfectly symmetrical. When a virtual particle pair deviates but does not annihilate, the balance is broken and a singularity appears. From then on, the universe was born and became the starting point of space and time. This is one way quantum mechanics explains the origin of the universe.

From the perspective of quantum mechanics, microscopic matter is never static. Elementary particles, including atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, and quarks, are constantly moving at extremely high speeds. For example, the resonance frequency of cesium atoms is about 9.2 billion Hz, which means 9.2 billion vibrations per second. Quantum motion has strange phenomena such as uncertainty, wave-particle duality, quantum entanglement, and superposition of states.

This is a very complex topic, so I won't go into detail here. I'll just mention it here to explain that not only are the macroscopic celestial bodies and stars constantly moving, but every atom and elementary particle in the microscopic world is also constantly moving. Therefore, movement is the basic attribute of everything in our universe.

What needs to be specially mentioned here is that the celestial bodies and stars we see with our naked eyes on the ground are calm and peaceful, and seem to be neither spitting fire nor emitting smoke. This is because they are too far away. In fact, most of the stars we see are stars. The core temperatures of these stars reach tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of degrees. They are all suns that spew fire and emit smoke. Even planets, like our Earth, often experience tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. They are not so calm.

I don’t know if I have made the issue clear by saying this. Discussions are welcome.

This is an original article from Space-Time Communication. Please respect the author’s copyright. Thank you for your understanding and support.