Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Aggressive Expansion
You know how the Universe is apparently expanding but at a slower rate than it was in previous billions of years ago? Couldn't that just be because now there is more Universe to expand and perhaps at the point of creation where the big bang supposedly happened, it's still expanding fast, but then on the 'edges' it's just going slower because there's more universe now? Or is the theory that it's slowing down reliant on the fact that there was a big bang, therefore, a bang of extreme energy that would eventually run out of energy because it had expended it all through expansion? I don't know. It's really confusing and brainunwinding.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Generally this debate usually hinges on the value you take for the total mass of the universe.
If there was enough "stuff" in the universe, then eventually (over a looooong time) gravity would slow the expansion down, and reverse it, so that the universe would collapse back in on itself (the "Big Crunch").
If there's not enough stuff, the expansion will just carry on forever until eventually the galaxies are too far away from each other to be seen and the universe will "go dark."
There's also a critical mass where the expansion eventually stops, but everything is too far away from everything else for gravity to pull it back together again.
The latest observations (that I'm aware of) actually show the universe expanding FASTER than we expected. As yet, there's no explanation for this, but you can read more about it at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe
HTH ^_^
Post a Comment