Some little galaxy ...
... broke wind.
Astronomers at the Space Telescope Institute and John Hopkins University have used NASA’s Hubble Telescope to show that the universe is expanding a little bit faster than expected. The Hubble Constant (how fast the universe expands with time) was predicted by the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory to be 67km per second …
You might as well ask what your mind expands into when you relax and meditate.
It's just a view from a different window. Really liked the story in the link, never seen that written out before (but have oddly always known it to be true).
This is why we think there are old souls. However, having thought about it a bit, how come so many of my 'younger-me' lifetimes are 'later' in the time-span of things, everywhere I look there are babies, babies, babies.
Perhaps they need to be loved and taught by those of me who have been around the block a bit? Still, not sure why I would have done some of the things I'm obviously up to when I get into power, I'll have to give myself a stern talking to about that when I see me.
Nothing: there is no notion of their being anything 'outside' the universe (in standard cosmology: there are theories in whch our universe is not everything, but you don't need such theories to explain expansion). The geometrical properties of the universe, including expansion, are what's called 'intrinsic' properties: they don't depend on the universe being somehow embedded into a larger structure.
To make things even worse, it seems very likely that the universe is in fact flat, and therefore infinite (or topologically very odd which I don't think is likely), and has therefore always been so. The sense in which such a thing is expanding is that points on it move further apart over time, and in fact the distance between any pair of points goes to zero as you run the thing backwards.
(Before saying that this idea is silly and obviously wrong, read a book on modern cosmology.)
The big rip will happen if the dark matter/energy is not replacing the "space" in-between. I'd say currently observations are that energy/matter to fill in that empty space cannot come into spontaneous existence... BUT...
As we don;t know what the dark energy is, the force driving the expansion etc, I say there is still time to find out if the big rip is a certainty, or something else is possible.
Theoretically, there does not seem to be anything preventing matter from appearing in the comic quantum foam in the big empty space left by a "big rip", so why would reality wait until then, and not be doing it small scale now?
"As for the rest, you're hitting up a modified version of Fred Hoyle's "continuous creation" there."
If the eternal inflation guys are right, then Hoyle has the last laugh on that.
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'dark energy' may simply be trying to explain something that's a bit more elegant, sort of like the way geocentrists tried to explain planetary motion. In their model, each planet revolved on an invisible disk around a center point, and the center point revolved about the earth. it worked in mechanical representations, since each of the 'disks' was basically earth's orbit. And it "explained" motion by predicting planetary positions mechanically. but it was WAY wrong.
One model I've seen may coincide with the observations a bit better. it would mean the universe is a bit smaller, though [or maybe way bigger?]. it's a non-linear way of looking at light propogation. The thought is that light travels "faster" over a distance. In under a few light years, the actual time it takes for light to travel from star to observer is roughly the same as the distance in, well, light years. But according to THIS model, vast distances travel FASTER because light is traveling in curved space. So in that model, the light seems to 'accelerate'. It explains a lot of the red shifting [not all of it] and the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe. It's also 'cool' in that something nonlinear is happening.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw that out there. I forget where I read about this, I just remember reading it back in the 80's or 90's. Is it true? Idunno. Is it a rectally extrapolated attempt to prove the universe isn't created by the big bang? That's a distinct possibility [it seems to have been a somewhat liked idea amongst the creationists to counter 'big bang', though I doubt it proves a 6,000 year old earth]. But the idea that light does not travel "linearly" through space has other implications that might revolutionize physics, if it's actually true...
(and we COULD be staring at the proof, right now!)
and we also assume that TIME is constant and/or follows our current predictions of relativity, and that light isn't somehow "lensing" due to the combined gravity of everything in the universe. If light traveled kind of "curvish" towards us (due to combined gravitational effects, let's say), we'd see distances as being farther than they actually are, through parallax and other means. And the farther away, the more curving you'd get, and really distant objects are hard enough to measure correctly, so is a 9% error THAT unexpected?
Need a better ruler, that's all.
/me imagines the sky through a sort of fish-eye lense, where the position of really distant luminous objects is slightly distorted from gravitational effects. that might do it, yeah. In that case, radio telescopes with finely tuned measurements _might_ be able to detect this.
Aaaannnnndd...your wrong.
The edge of the universe is NOT rapidly expanding. I really wish people would stop pushing this fake science non-sense; but hay, what ever keeps the grant money rolling in right. But, But...We can see it. Why yes we can. However, just because you can observe something happening, that does not necessarily mean that your interpretation of said observation is correct. What we have here, is the failure to comprehend the concept of TIME and more importantly...RELATIVITY.
TLDR; The edge of the universe is not rapidly expanding, we're just moving slower through time than it is.
So, there was this really smart guy once, I think his name was Einstein. He came up with this really cool theory called Relativity, both normal and special. He posited that space and time are interwoven like a fabric; and when an object of mass is placed on it, that fabric becomes warped around it. The more massive the object the greater the warping. Now keep in mind this is not just space but also time. Time is not Newtonian it's relative, although for simplicity we can think of local time in Newtonian terms.
There is another really smart guy named Hawking. He used this theory of Einstein's to posit a means of time travel (Into the Universe with Steven Hawking, ep.2). Dalorian not included, although with some modifications I guess you could if you really wanted. As we all should already know, the closer you get to a black hole the more time slows down (that's not entirely correct, but that's what most people think and it's good enough for now). If you were create a space ship and send it to Sag. A (our galaxy's super massive black hole), calculate an orbital trajectory that would place your orbit at a distance close enough to create a 2:1 temporal ratio (because time is slowing down - sort of); you could orbit Sag. A for five years to travel an extra 5 years into the future relative to Earth. In other words, If you were to clock that orbit at 30 seconds an Earth based ground observer would clock your same orbit at 60 seconds. If those ground based observers could observe you actions on the ship, you would appear to be moving in slow motion; However, to you, time is moving at a normal pace. But lets expand on this example of Hawking's a bit shall we.
So, your on a space ship zipping around a black hole. Instead of Earth observing you as in the above example, lets check things out from your perspective. What do you see when you look back at Earth? Everything is moving in fast forward. Where above 30 seconds to you is 60 seconds to Earth, 30 seconds on Earth is 15 seconds to you. But, to each of you, 30 seconds is 30 seconds. The difference in time is relative in your location to the other. So lets expand this further. Instead of a space ship orbiting Sag. A, you have Earth, in the Sol system, orbiting a ~100 to ~140 thousand light year wide MASSIVE spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way. Instead of looking back at Earth, we're now looking out at the edge of the Universe. Given the example above, what do you think we should see? Ding...Ding...Ding...The edge of the universe moving in fast forward.
Therefor, it's not rapidly expanding. Time is just moving at a faster pace out there relative to use, due to mass of our galaxy slowing it down for us. If you could take that same space ship of Hawking's and place out in the void of space, outside the gravitational influence of galaxy's, and observe the edge of the universe; you would find that the universe is actually expanding at a relatively constant rate fairly close to what we currently predict it should be. I guess I now know how Galileo felt trying to explain real science to the supposed intellectual elite. I await my Nobel Prize, but somehow i get the feeling i'll get the same treatment as Galileo...Oh, Well.
The Hubble Constant (how fast the universe expands with time) was predicted by the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory to be 67km per second per megaparsec (3.3 million light-years), shortly before the spacecraft was deactivated after a successful four-year mission.
As Fox Mulder would say: "A very convenient coincidence".
I was trying to 'explain' parsecs and megaparsecs to my 12 year old and in the end just said astronomers like numbers with lots of numbers.
Beautiful night out tonite - already well below 270K so need to get the car battery out to the Dobsonian so it can cool the mirror in time for the rugby.
Get "Space Engine" a *to scale model of the universe.
*Scale is 1:1, adjusting for size of monitor of cause... yes, that's not a joke. You can go anywhere in the universe, and zoom in/out as per accurate as we can get with current data and maths on a home PC. Is an amazing bit of software.
Get "Space Engine" a *to scale model of the universe.
Sounds like the "Total Perspective Vortex":
"... every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake."
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
"Post Brexit they need a new variable yurrupean one."
yeah what WAS it with all the science-re-namey things. The first time I heard 'Sieverts' I was all "what the hell?" and then I googled and found out that someone changed the name AND 1 Sv became 100 REM which is like "thanks a LOT for making me do more math in my head".
New 'SI' units meant "we were not very busy at that moment, so we did some make-work and appeared like we were doing something important for a while".
So why NOT come up with something more 'European' than 'Hubble Constant'? You can't have British or American scientist names in things any more, after all...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble
Let's call it "Lemaître's constant" from now on, then. He's a Belgian [that's EU enough, right?]
"I presume they will keep on measuring until they either get the same results over a significant period of time or/and they end up with a set of results which don't need additional dark matter/beer/chocolate to make them acceptable."
Or it only seems like a constant because we've not been measuring for long enough to see the change.
The edge of the universe is nothing more than the ripple you'd see if you threw a stone into a pond. What is outside the universe is the same as whats inside. We had a big bang and our universe is inside the center of that ripple. There are others, well outside what we can see beyond the ripple. It's just so mind-bogglingly far that it's hard to grasp. Think trillions or more of light years away. Much of our galaxy/universe would be forever changed before we'd see light from outside our universe.
"It's just so mind-bogglingly far that it's hard to grasp. Think trillions or more of light years away."
As a Brit I couldn't grasp it taking two days to travel from Los Angeles, CA to San Antonio, TX by road. Still, some spectacular views along the way and I saw the Milky Way with my own eyes for the first time.
Traveled western US with some friends, one a guy from Sweden. He made us stop every 15-20 minutes driving across Kansas. He would take a picture. We kept asking, "Why are you taking a picture of 'nothing?'" (To us, the expanse of cornfields going off to infinity was nothing.) He just kept mumbling, "They won't believe how huge it is!"