Table of Contents
Is the universe is expanding what is it expanding into?
The universe is everything, so it isn’t expanding into anything. It’s just expanding. All of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from each other, and every region of space is being stretched, but there’s no center they’re expanding from and no outer edge to expand into anything else.
Do you expand with the universe?
The expansion rate of the Universe, as we measure it (even with our current ongoing controversies), is somewhere around 70 km/s/Mpc, which means that for every Megaparsec away a “raisin” is, we’ll see it appear to recede at 70 km/s. Unfortunately, Megaparsecs are enormous: about 3.3 million light-years.
Is the universe expanding or are we shrinking?
It is a well-established fact that the universe is expanding. It grows without center, like an inflating raisin cake, but an infinite raisin cake filling all of space in all directions. The raisins are the galaxies. Or somewhere in between — the universe grows a little while we shrink a little.
Is the universe expanding or collapsing?
There’s also the fact that not only is the universe as we know it expanding, but it’s accelerating in its expansion, with no sign whatsoever of it slowing down (let alone collapsing) anytime soon.
What would happen if the universe started shrinking?
If objects in the Universe were shrinking, the Universe would actually be collapsing. If galaxies weren’t moving away from each other, their gravity would cause them to start falling toward each other. A Universe of shrinking objects would look exactly opposite to what we observe.
Is the universe expanding?
With one fell swoop, the expanding Universe went from being an idea to being the leading idea describing our Universe. The way the expansion works is a little counterintuitive. It’s as though the fabric of space itself is getting stretched over time, and all the objects within that space are being dragged apart from one another.
Is the fabric of space expanding?
But even though the fabric of space is expanding throughout the Universe — everywhere and in all directions — we aren’t. Our atoms remain the same size. So do the planets, moons, and stars, as well as the distances separating them.
What happens if you don’t add an extra cosmological constant?
He showed that if you didn’t add this extra cosmological constant, and you had a Universe that was filled with anything energetic — matter, radiation, dust, fluid, etc. — there were two classes of solutions: one for a contracting Universe and one for an expanding Universe.
Why don’t galaxies expand unnoticeably?
It’s not that galaxies expand unnoticeably, they don’t expand at all. The full solution, then, is both the cosmic and the local solutions stitched together: expanding space between non-expanding galaxies. (Though these solutions are usually only dealt with by computer simulations due to their mathematical complexity.)