- 3401 - UNIVERSE - expanding into what? The Universe hasn't existed forever but only for a finite time since the Big Bang, and it's been expanding ever since that event took place. We are expanding as you are reading this.
--------------------- 3401 - UNIVERSE - expanding into what?
- Most people intuitively hear that big "bang" and picture an explosion, and then conceive of expansion like they would visualize shrapnel hurled outwards in all directions.
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- It's true that the matter and energy in the Universe began in a hot and dense state all at once, and then expanded and cooled as all the various components sped away from one another. But that doesn't mean the "explosion" picture is correct.
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- When the universe expands there should be a place where it started expanding. Whenever you have an explosion it always begins at a specific location in space. An explosion initially occupies a small but finite volume. And an explosion expands rapidly outward in all directions, limited only by the external forces and barriers it encounters.
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- That fastest-moving material will spread out more quickly and farther than the rest of the material, and will become less dense as a result. Even though the energy density drops everywhere, it drops fastest farthest away from the explosion, because more energetic material becomes less dense faster: at the outskirts. Just by measuring the trajectories of these different particles, you can always reconstruct where the explosion occurred.
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- If you look farther and farther away, you also look farther and farther into the past. The farthest we can see back in time is 13.8 billion years, our estimate for the age of the Universe. It's the extrapolation back to the earliest times that led to the idea of the Big Bang. While everything we observe is consistent with the Big Bang framework, it's not something that can ever be proven.
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- This picture doesn't match up with our Universe. The Universe looks the same here as it does a few million or even a few billion light-years away. It has the same densities, the same energies, the same number of galaxies in a given volume of space, etc.
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- The objects that are very far away do indeed appear to move away from us at greater speeds than the nearby objects, but they also don't appear to be the same age as the slower, closer objects. Instead, as we go to extreme distances, the farther ones appear younger, less evolved, greater in number, and smaller in size and mass.
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- Despite the fact that we can see galaxies out to distances in excess of 30 billion light-years, if we track how everything is moving and reconstruct their trajectories back to a common origin, we see the most unlikely of outcomes: “the perceived "center" lands right on us“.
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- Our location lies on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster which is a large collection of stars near the Milky Way. This image is deceptive. It isn't a real structure, as dark energy will drive most of these clumps apart, fragmenting them as time goes on. Yet if our Universe began with an explosion, the explosion's reconstructed center would lie right here: in this supercluster, which occupies less than one billionth of the volume of the observable Universe.
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- Of all the trillions of galaxies in the Universe, what are the odds that we would just happen to be right at the center of the explosion that began the Universe? What are the odds, on top of those minuscule ones, that the initial explosion was configured in just such a way, complete with:
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------------------- Irregular, inhomogeneous densities,
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------------------- Varying start times for star formation and galaxy growth,
------------------- Energies that vary tremendously from place-to-place in just the right, fine-tuned fashion,
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------------------- A mysterious 2.7 K background glow in all directions, to conspire so that we're exactly at the center?
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- An explosion in space would have the outermost material move away the fastest, which means it would get less dense, would lose energy the fastest, and would display different properties the farther away you went from the center. It would also need to expand into something, rather than stretching space itself.
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- Instead, however, the law of gravity that governs our Universe, Einstein's General theory of Relativity, predicts that a Universe full of matter and energy doesn't explode, but instead expands.
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- A Universe that's full of equal amounts of stuff everywhere, with the same average densities and temperatures, must either expand or contract; since we observe an apparent recession, the expansion solution is the only one that's physical.
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- There's a misconception that an expanding Universe can be extrapolated back to a single point; this isn't necessarily true! Instead, it can be extrapolated back to a region of finite size with certain properties filled with matter, radiation, the laws of physics, etc., but then must evolve according to the rules that our theory of gravity lays out.
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- This leads to a Universe that has similar properties everywhere. This means that in any finite, equally-sized region of space, we should see the same density to the Universe, the same temperature to the Universe, the same number of galaxies, etc.
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- We'd also see a Universe that appeared to evolve with time, as more distant regions should appear to us as they were in the past, having expanded less and having experienced less gravitational attraction and smaller amounts of clustering.
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- Because the Big Bang happened everywhere at once a finite amount of time ago, our local corner of the Universe will appear to be the oldest corner of the Universe that there is. From our vantage point, what appears to us nearby is almost as old as we are, but what appears at great distances is much more similar to what our nearby Universe was like many billions of years ago.
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- When you look at a region of the sky with an instrument like the Hubble Space Telescope, you are not simply viewing the light from distant objects as it was when that light was emitted, but also as the light is affected by all the intervening material, and the expansion of space, that it experiences along its journey.
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- Hubble has taken us farther back than any other observatory to date, and has shown us a Universe that evolves in galaxy type, size, and number density with time. The distant galaxies that exist are constantly emitting light, and we are seeing the light that has arrived only after it has completed its journey to get to us through the expanding Universe.
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- Galaxies whose light took a billion or ten billion years to get here appear as they were a billion or ten billion years ago. If we go all the way back, towards almost the moment of the Big Bang itself, we'd find that the Universe when it was that young was dominated by radiation, and not matter. It has to expand and cool for matter to become more important, energy-wise.
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- Over time, as that Universe expands and cools, neutral atoms can finally, stably form without being immediately blasted apart. The radiation that once dominated the Universe, however, still persists, and continues to cool and redshift due to the expansion of space.
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- What we perceive today as the “Cosmic Microwave Background” is consistent with being the leftover glow from the Big Bang, but is also observable from anywhere in the Universe.
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- The large-scale structure of the Universe changes over time, as tiny imperfections grow to form the first stars and galaxies, then merge together to form the large, modern galaxies we see today.
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- Looking to great distances reveals a younger Universe, similar to how our local region was in the past. Going back past the earliest galaxies we can observe, we find the leftover glow from the Big Bang itself, which appears in all directions and should be visible from anywhere in the Universe.
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- There isn't necessarily a center to the Universe at all; it's only our biased intuition that tells us there ought to be one. We can set a lower limit on the size of the region where the Big Bang must have occurred. It can be no smaller than the size of a soccer ball but there is no upper limit; the region of space where the Big Bang occurred could even have been infinite.
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- If there truly is a center, it could literally be anywhere, and we would have no way to know. The portion of the Universe that is observable to us is insufficiently large to reveal that information, even if it could be true. We'd need to see an edge to the Universe , or observe a fundamental anisotropy where different directions appear different, but, we see the same temperatures and galaxy counts, and, we'd need to see a Universe that appeared to be different from region-to-region on the largest cosmic scales, but, it appears to be homogeneous instead.
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- The Universe, particularly on smaller scales, is not perfectly homogeneous, but on large scales the homogeneity and isotropy is a good assumption to better than 99.99% accuracy.
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- It sounds so reasonable to ask the question, "where did the Universe begin expanding from?" But once you realize all of the above, you'll recognize that's the wrong question entirely. "Everywhere, all at once," is the answer to that question, and that's largely because the Big Bang isn't referring to a special location in space, but rather a special moment in time.
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- The Big Bang is a condition that affects the entire observable Universe all at once at one specific moment. It's the reason why looking at objects that are farther away in space means that we're seeing that object as it was at a moment in the distant past. It's why all directions appear to have rough properties that are uniform regardless of where we look. And it's why we can trace back our cosmic history, through the evolution of the objects we see, as far back as our observatories enable us to go.
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- Galaxies comparable to the present-day Milky Way are numerous, but younger galaxies that are MilkyWay-like are inherently smaller, bluer, more chaotic, and richer in gas in general than the galaxies we see today. For the first galaxies of all, this ought to be taken to the extreme, and remains valid as far back as we've ever seen.
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- Despite all that we have access to, despite all that our theories and observations tell us , there's still a tremendous amount that remains unknown to us.
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--------------- We don't know what the actual size of the entire Universe is; we only have a lower limit that it must now be at least 46.1 billion light-years in radius in all directions from our perspective.
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--------------- We don't know what the shape of the fabric of space is, and whether it's positively curved like a sphere, negatively curved like a saddle, or perfectly flat, like a sheet or a cylinder.
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--------------- We don't know whether it curves back on itself or whether it goes on forever.
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- All that we know is based on all we can observe. From that information, we can conclude that it's consistent with being infinite in size, it's consistent with perfect flatness, but information to the contrary may lie in the next significant digit of data or just beyond our observable cosmic horizon.
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- On a logarithmic scale, the Universe nearby has the solar system and our Milky Way galaxy. But far beyond are all the other galaxies in the Universe, the large-scale cosmic web, and eventually the moments immediately following the Big Bang itself.
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- Although we cannot observe farther than this cosmic horizon which is presently a distance of 46.1 billion light-years away, there will be more Universe to reveal itself to us in the future. The observable Universe contains 2 trillion galaxies today, but as time goes on, more Universe will become observable to us, perhaps revealing some cosmic truths that are obscure to us today.
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- The reason we cannot know the true nature of the Universe, the entire, unobservable Universe, is because the portion that we have access to is finite. There's a finite amount of information we're capable of gleaning about our cosmos, even if we develop arbitrarily powerful instruments and detectors.
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- Whether you view the fabric of space as a leavening loaf of raisin bread or an expanding balloon with coins glued to the surface, you must keep in mind that the part of the Universe we can access is likely only a tiny component of whatever it is that actually exists.
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- What's observable to us only sets a lower limit on the entirety of what's out there. The Universe could be finite or infinite, but the things we're certain of is that it's expanding, getting less dense, and that more distant objects appear as they were a long time ago.
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- The Universe is expanding the way your mind is expanding. It's not expanding into anything; you're just getting less dense. I am definitely less dense as I expand. Fat is less dense than muscle.
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January 9, 2022 UNIVERSE - expanding into what? 3386
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