Expanding universe

Italy
December 23, 2006 4:41am CST
Recently, in fact, only a week or two ago, it was announced that scientists had finally proven that the universe is, in fact, expanding. There was always very influencial speculation that this was so, however, some in the scientific community attributed the apparent expansion only to the rotation of the universe. In short, some believed that the universe was stationary and that rotation was what caused the "red-shift' readings to indicate that it was expanding. We now have irrefutable confirmation of this, so now, we have another, very important question to ask. Is it expanding past it's escape velocity? Is the expansion of our universe fast enough to escape gravity's pull? If this is so, then we would grow further and further apart from the rest of the universe forever, as opposed to gravity returning us all to a "singularity" (uuh I hate that singularity) much like a thrown tennis ball returns to the ground. The problem is, we can never know this In order to determine our universes escape velocity, we need to know how much matter there is in it. Again, the "dark matter/dark energy" conundrum returns here. Only about 70% of the universes matter has been accounted for as of yet, so we cannot approximate our escape velocity. What are your thoughts? Will we keep expanding forever, or will the gravity of all the matter in the universe eventually overcome expansion, bringing us all closer together until we become a singularity, and the Big Bang once again repeats itself?
4 people like this
20 responses
@abg1988 (340)
• India
23 Dec 06
its said that the scientist have found the tremendous change in the earth.
• Italy
23 Dec 06
What change?
• India
23 Dec 06
every thing is going to be destroyed in the near future.
• Italy
23 Dec 06
Nothing can be destroied and nothing can be created, everything can be transformed. Remember this if you want to understand the nature.
@scorpius (1792)
• India
23 Dec 06
i do nt think that we would keep n expanding forever. mena we would for some time bbut eventually it will all come back again together.nothing is infinite and nothing is forever!
• Italy
23 Dec 06
almost nothing... if you have a religion
@dodoguy (1292)
• Australia
24 Dec 06
Hi ready2earn, sadly, these "scientists" are little more than highly paid idiots. consider this - stars have been discovered which are clearly IN FRONT OF galaxies with respect to Earth as observer - yet the galaxies in question have a "red shift" which places them much closer to Earth than the stars which are in front of them. The "red shift" nonsense has been exposed as just that - nonsense. Numerous lucrative and highly acclaimed careers and billions in gvernment grants have all been built up on the scaffolds and trestles of the theories, tests and experiments extending from the "red shift" premise. So now, even though it's been irrefutably proven to be wrong, you won't get hardly anyone to admit it. Ever seen a runaway freight train? How do you stop it? Not by standing in front of it and holding your hand up and saying "stop!", that's for sure. And anyone who "goes against the grain" of this self-sustaining delusional view of the universe will likewise get rolled if they try to bring the world to it's senses. Too many careers and egoes, too much government money and grants, all tied up in the matter. It's actually taken on the proportions and characteristics of a religion. If you speak the truth, self-evident as it is, you'll be burnt at the stake as a heretic. The "red shift" theory of the "expanding universe" is wrong. The universe is not expanding. The "Big Bang" dogma is crap. But don't let me dampen your spirits. The party will undoubtedly go on - for decades, if not centuries.
@kaniam (582)
• India
24 Dec 06
if you are interested in space and universe write to me at mukherjee.mainak@rediffmail.com i have many ideas and i am a active participater
• India
24 Dec 06
as per quantum theory of relativity -Albert Einsteen the universe as we know it is certialy expanding , the galaxies closer t each other are being held close by their gravity and those far away will tend to drift away slowly thus constantly expanding the universe . But still modern day scientist beleive that there will be a point when the universe has expanded to its outer limit and will being to fall to in to its point of origin once again
@Piratesware (2888)
• Indonesia
23 Dec 06
yup..what in universe is very unpredictable..but universe is can not predictable
• India
24 Dec 06
thanx for the information keep posting your best ones thanx again
@blanksolid (1631)
• Spain
23 Dec 06
I agree with you, universe is expanding all time so its much more hard going to other planets because the distances are much more bigger, have a nice day on mylot.
@rebeka (364)
• Romania
24 Dec 06
this theory is since 16 years i'm amazed that they prooved only yet
• Canada
24 Dec 06
I could have sworn I heard of this long ago, but you said so much about it, there's very little to expand on it. I actually do not believe we'll escape the orbit we're in before the Earth is destroyed. I think the Sun will be destroyed much sooner than us leaving our orbit.
@srenda (382)
• Brazil
23 Dec 06
If the universe is really infinity, it will expand forever.
@darule (81)
• India
23 Dec 06
These cant be belived already there are so many counter belifs to big band...... I think these for now are beyond our perceptions and not much we ccould do about it anyways
@Leonzz (195)
• Brazil
23 Dec 06
I think the universe is one of things cant be explained at this time.
@alienstar (5142)
• India
23 Dec 06
Expanding Universe - Expanding Universe
To begin with, scientists didn't come out with the news of expanding universe recently but way back in the year 1998.This discovery was made by using exploding stars as a tool indicating distance.According to the scientists old report, our universe is expanding rapidly these day's than old day's. All stars will see all other stars moving away from them in an expanding universe.
@brujj1 (228)
• Canada
23 Dec 06
I don't know if I want to know so much detail about the universe. But yes, there is a verse in the Qur'an that says Allah expands the universe and sometimes contracts it too. I am not sure about the verse but I remember reading it.
@Doober01 (197)
• United States
23 Dec 06
They discovered there is 12 planets now not nine. Wonder which one et is from LOL just joking
@utsadetti (4589)
• United States
23 Dec 06
universe? it's interesting topic.
• India
23 Dec 06
For thousands of years, astronomers wrestled with basic questions about the size and age of the universe. Does the universe go on forever, or does it have an edge somewhere? Has it always existed, or did it come to being some time in the past? In 1929, Edwin Hubble, an astronomer at Caltech, made a critical discovery that soon led to scientific answers for these questions: he discovered that the universe is expanding. The ancient Greeks recognized that it was difficult to imagine what an infinite universe might look like. But they also wondered that if the universe were finite, and you stuck out your hand at the edge, where would your hand go? The Greeks' two problems with the universe represented a paradox - the universe had to be either finite or infinite, and both alternatives presented problems. After the rise of modern astronomy, another paradox began to puzzle astronomers. In the early 1800s, German astronomer Heinrich Olbers argued that the universe must be finite. If the Universe were infinite and contained stars throughout, Olbers said, then if you looked in any particular direction, your line-of-sight would eventually fall on the surface of a star. Although the apparent size of a star in the sky becomes smaller as the distance to the star increases, the brightness of this smaller surface remains a constant. Therefore, if the Universe were infinite, the whole surface of the night sky should be as bright as a star. Obviously, there are dark areas in the sky, so the universe must be finite. But, when Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, he realized that gravity is always attractive. Every object in the universe attracts every other object. If the universe truly were finite, the attractive forces of all the objects in the universe should have caused the entire universe to collapse on itself. This clearly had not happened, and so astronomers were presented with a paradox. When Einstein developed his theory of gravity in the General Theory of Relativity, he thought he ran into the same problem that Newton did: his equations said that the universe should be either expanding or collapsing, yet he assumed that the universe was static. His original solution contained a constant term, called the cosmological constant, which cancelled the effects of gravity on very large scales, and led to a static universe. After Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein called the cosmological constant his "greatest blunder." At around the same time, larger telescopes were being built that were able to accurately measure the spectra, or the intensity of light as a function of wavelength, of faint objects. Using these new data, astronomers tried to understand the plethora of faint, nebulous objects they were observing. Between 1912 and 1922, astronomer Vesto Slipher at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona discovered that the spectra of light from many of these objects was systematically shifted to longer wavelengths, or redshifted. A short time later, other astronomers showed that these nebulous objects were distant galaxies.
@jo0911 (135)
• Philippines
23 Dec 06
Based on some theories including the Big-Bang Theory and the Oscillating theory if i'm not mistaken, we can say that the Universe itself is expanding. But on the other hand, those are theoretically explained by astronomers, meaning not yet proven. And if it is not proven yet, we cannot say that the universe is expanding as stated in the Big-Bang Theory. All we can do now is to study more and more astronomy if you want to prove your beliefs. That's all