1
$\begingroup$

I want to base my novel off of the idea of a star creating millions of galaxies from a gigantic coronal mass ejection. Due to this it spawns the void which threatens to absorb the entirety of space, causing the reality to have to spilt into 5 layers to form negentrophy.

I know that a CME is large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun’s corona that ejects billions of tons of coronal material and carries an embedded magnetic field that is stronger than the background solar wind interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength.

How do I make that make sense with my story?

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
14
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ I don't think there's any way for that to make sense with our current understanding of physics. But hey, it's (soft) sci-fi $\endgroup$
    – M S
    May 19 at 14:00
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ You need to do more reading on stellar evolution and cosmology. Or just brand the work as "fantasy" and make it a god-fart or something... $\endgroup$
    – Zeiss Ikon
    May 19 at 14:00
  • 9
    $\begingroup$ Have you done any research about the comparative sizes of CMEs, stars, black holes, and galaxies? This is like having an ant give birth to an elephant which then causes the planet to tip over. $\endgroup$
    – Christopher James Huff
    May 19 at 14:41
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ not just an elephant but millions of elephants (which cause the planet to tip over). But hey, it's your story. Main thing is it needs to be entertaining. Science can take a back seat if science is bad for your story. $\endgroup$
    – user253751
    May 19 at 15:11
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ You do realize a galaxy's mass consists of millions or even billions of stars, right? So how can one star be big enough to produce millions of galaxies? $\endgroup$
    – DKNguyen
    May 20 at 1:12

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
14
$\begingroup$

It doesn't make sense if you want to stay under the umbrella of a science based explanation:

  • a galaxy is made of billions of stars, and it is impossible for a single star to produce million of galaxies.

  • whatever you mean with absorbing the space and splitting into 5 layers is beyond any science I am aware of.

Nevertheless, we have sagas built around the concept of Force, around magically imbued rings and so on. You don't need science to make an enjoyable world, you need something that can be grasped at a glance and that can withstand a superficial analysis, what is normally called suspension of disbelief.

If you can do that, you are good to go.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
12
  • $\begingroup$ What would make more sense for how the galaxies were created? $\endgroup$
    – Nivek
    May 19 at 14:16
  • $\begingroup$ If you have many objects and need to measure the combined gravitational pull of all of them, you can just figure out where the center of mass is and assume that all the mass is at exactly that point. So take a bunch of stars, and work out the center of mass. All the individual stars orbit around that center, and that's what a galaxy is. (I'm glossing over a lot of details). If two smaller galaxies get close enough together, all the stars start orbiting the center of mass of both galaxies, and the galaxies merge into a larger one. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_formation_and_evolution $\endgroup$
    – Ray
    May 19 at 15:05
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ For the initial galaxy formation, you have a gas cloud that gets pulled together into clumps by gravity, and those clumps form stars, and those stars (continue to) orbit the center of mass. $\endgroup$
    – Ray
    May 19 at 15:08
  • 6
    $\begingroup$ @Nivek "Cthulhu did it" is slightly more scientific than what you wrote in the post $\endgroup$
    – user253751
    May 19 at 15:13
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ The biggest problem with your explanation is one of scale. An individual galaxy is billions of times larger than a star. You have a single star creating millions of galaxies. Where is that extra mass coming from? A galaxy that forms from a gas cloud will have exactly as much mass as the gas cloud had; it's just that most of it will be clumped together into stars. A star that creates a gas cloud (which they do when they explode in a supernova) will yield a gas cloud with no more mass than the star had. (A supernova can also exert pressure on an existing cloud and trigger star formation). $\endgroup$
    – Ray
    May 19 at 15:31
8
$\begingroup$

Stars Have a Maximum Mass

The bigger a star is the faster it burns. This places the maximum mass of a star at about 150 times that of the Sun. Any more than this and it passes the Eddington limit meaning that it starts ejecting so much solar wind that the gases around it all get swept away preventing more mass from falling into it.

The only things in the universe more massive than 150 solar masses are blackholes.

In contrast, the smallest stars are about 0.07 solar masses meaning that even if your galaxy was made of tiny red dwarves, you'd get at most ~1243 stars... in practice a lot few than this since some will be much bigger than 0.07 solar masses and a lot of your mass will be unable to form stars.

Even Dwarf galaxies have between thousands and millions of stars; so, you're not even going to get a respectable dwarf galaxy out of one exploding star, much less millions of galaxies.

But they might have good reason to BELIEVE the universe originated from an exploding star

Depending on your civilization's tech level, it is possible that they have observed supernovas, but have never worked out the limits or properties of the strong force, or observed a black hole. If this is the case, then your civilization may wrongfully believe in a primordial super star going nova as an explanation for the expanding universe and Cosmic Background Radiation.

Or maybe they do have the science to prove the Big Bang was not a star, but some ancient document of great religious importance SAYS it was a star; so, there may be a theological element determined to "scientifically prove" the exploding star theory just like many scientists of the 20th century worked really hard to prove that the Earth was only a few thousand years old well past when it should have been obvious that it was not.

In this context, there are two scientific theories that could be reframed as evidence for an exploding "primordial star".

The big bang theory

While our own universe probably did not emerge from an exploding star per say, it is believed by many to have emerged from an explosion like event ~13.8 billion years ago called the big bang. There are a lot of different explanations for the big bang, but the most common understanding is that there was so much mass in one spot that the universe existed in an almost equilibrium of gravity. Infinity gravity to your left and infinity gravity to your right is like having no gravity at all; so, through a sort of cosmic buffer-overflow, the near-infinite mass "exploded" creating the ~200 billion galaxies in the observable universe... plus all the stuff we cant observe so well.

About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, hydrogen started to form allowing the first black-body radiation, and the whole universe began to glow a bright red-orange. While not necessarily a "star" in the traditional since, it would have from the outside looked like a giant Class-M star nearly 85 million light years across. So your civilization could simply describe this time of the universe as being like a massive star. For cultural or linguistic reasons, they may choose not to differentiate this state of the universe from what we today consider stars.

Superstring theory

In order for superstring theory to work out, the 4 dimensions of space and time are practically infinite, but the other 6-7 dimensions appear to be relatively small and confined. One explanation of this is that as the universe expands, it is growing along the dimensions of space and time but contracting along the other dimensions, thus conserving its volume. If this is true, then it is possible that at the beginning of time, all of the dimensions were the same size which would have dramatically altered the physics of stars in the early universe. It could be that at the beginning of time, gravity was much much weaker or the Strong force was much much stronger which could have made a super-star of unimaginable size and mass a possibility.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
3
  • $\begingroup$ So what could I replace the idea of a star with then? anything other than a black hole? $\endgroup$
    – Nivek
    May 19 at 18:44
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Black holes are also extremely tiny in comparison to galaxies. Apart from clouds of gas, the only entities larger than galaxies are made of galaxies: galactic clusters and superclusters, galaxy filaments, etc. As stated elsewhere, your idea has fundamental problems with scale. $\endgroup$
    – Christopher James Huff
    May 19 at 21:47
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @Nivek The largest of blackholes have the mass of a single small galaxy, but they don't explode by any known mechanism... That said, there is the big bang theory which basically says that if you gather an infinite (or nearly infinite amount of mass in one spot, that it can explode due to the matter settling into a more-or-less equilibrium state. $\endgroup$
    – Nosajimiki
    May 20 at 5:32
4
$\begingroup$

Replace the star with something else

If a star giving birth to billions of galaxies doesn't make sense, replace the star with one of the following hypothetical stellar objects

  • one (or more) space threads/strings: these are 4D objects that join the structure of the universe together, making it expand (it doesn't have to make 100% sense). The galaxies are created as matter that emerges as the threads stretch in length as the universe expands, like how blood emerges from bone.
  • a massive white hole (that exists in the centre of the universe?) 'burps' mass out in a semi-random basis, producing galaxy-sized clouds of hydrogen in random directions and speeds. Some clouds emerge slowly enough that they merge with others. The white hole has the opposite of gravity; it pushes stuff away.
  • universe fabric 'quakes' happen, more often where deep voids in the universe exist, causing galaxy material to emerge into the universe from the temporarily present fissures in spacetime. These fissures close shortly after, but perhaps they can be mapped by appropriately advanced technology and used to explore beyond?
  • in your universe, galaxies sometimes (for some reason) slow down their rotation to a point where they coalesce into an ultra-massive black hole at the core of a greater galaxy-sized star (read about real black-hole stars). This is due to exceptional interaction with dark matter. The star at some point fails due to the black hole sucking it in, and due to the extreme interactions, the dark matter gets converted into normal matter and as the star is failing, galaxy-sized newly-converted matter gets spewed, until the star supernovas and blows the matter away to form galaxies years later.
Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
1
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you sir i really appreciate your input $\endgroup$
    – Nivek
    May 23 at 12:59
3
$\begingroup$

The goddess of creation was murdered

From her bleeding wounds, spilled uncountable worlds and galaxies. As the power of raw Creation poured into the universe, it destabilized the fabric of reality, ripping it apart.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
0
$\begingroup$

No

A star infinitesimally (literally and conceptually) smaller than what you're describing would collapse into a black hole. A star big enough to do what you're describing would long since have collapsed into the great-great-great-great grandmother of all black holes. If we ignore all that, the plausibility of a CME given a star of such enormous gravity (every possible pun intended, no offense) is, well... it isn't possible insofar as we understand science. It's not even believable.

Now, if what you could possibly be asking is whether or not the situation you've described would make a better-than-average creation myth. Yeah. Love it.

Wait... you tagged your question "magic!"

Absolutely! With magic all things are possible, including everything you've described. Cheers.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
0
$\begingroup$

This is basically the big bang.

Around ten seconds after the big bang there was a huge quantity of hydrogen which underwent fusion into helium. An external observer could certainly describe this as a star generating numerous galaxies.

The CME could be due to some asymmetrical physical reactions which caused the big bang to eject different sorts of matter in different directions.

Our physical laws are mostly symmetrical, but this universe could have less symmetrical laws, and so in one direction you have an explosion of normal stars and galaxies, and in the other direction you have the void, aka strangelets. This is a weird sort of matter that converts other matter into itself, and which is not great at sustaining life.

So, in one direction you have normal matter, in the other direction you have strangelets, and if they meet chaos results.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .