Evidence for Universe Expansion Found

[Cheese]

It is Scientology after all! Get on your knees fools.....our God is Tom Cruise!

The smoking gun

Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.

Of course this was only 75 years ago...shortly after the "creator" made the rest of it.

Earlier studies of WMAP data have determined that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few hundred thousand years.

[Knut]

Ok Xenu......

Go rule your 76 world intergalactic empire and leave us alone....or are we part of your empire because of the "spirits" of the guys you threw in the volcano in us???

Honestly.. i think the biggest mystery is whether the universe is going to go through a big freeze or a big implosion back.......

or.. if there are other dimensions that hold everything like matter and energy in a precious balance... but then what happens in the next order higher... those 11 dimensions in string theory... ??? I mean what created the string first... or is it jsut one big paradox.. where the future is the past and the past the future and that would explain the infinite universe.. or is it infinite???

I have spent many a night pondering these things and getting frustrated... good thing i found alchohol to tame these thoughts... mmmmm beer.

[Barnes]

Who cares about this stuff. Carry a towel and everything will be fine. Oh and never listen to Vogon poetry.


Don't Panic

[evman150]

Speaking of string theory, one of the quoted physicists in that article, Dr. Brian Greene of Columbia University, wrote "the book" on string theory.

It's an exciting time for cosmology.

And who cares? I guess I care. Cosmology is one of the areas of astronomy I am most interested in.

What can be more interesting than seeking the answers to the most important questions?

[Barnes]

Originally Posted by evman150

Speaking of string theory, one of the quoted physicists in that article, Dr. Brian Greene of Columbia University, wrote "the book" on string theory.

It's an exciting time for cosmology.

And who cares? I guess I care. Cosmology is one of the areas of astronomy I am most interested in.

What can be more interesting than seeking the answers to the most important questions?

http://www.douglasadams.com/

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

[Neeper]

Originally Posted by Hesla

Honestly.. i think the biggest mystery is whether the universe is going to go through a big freeze or a big implosion back.......

I think it will implode back and then start all over again. I think it's a cycle. How long the cycle runs, I don't know. All the energy will collapse on itself and explode. If the universe is believed to be 13.7 billion years, then it's quite possible 14 billion years ago we might have had this same conversation. Which opens another can of worms. Is the universe just on a repeat cycle? Far-fetched, I know, but interesting to imagine.

[evman150]

Originally Posted by Neeper

I think it will implode back and then start all over again. I think it's a cycle. How long the cycle runs, I don't know. All the energy will collapse on itself and explode. If the universe is believed to be 13.7 billion years, then it's quite possible 14 billion years ago we might have had this same conversation. Which opens another can of worms. Is the universe just on a repeat cycle? Far-fetched, I know, but interesting to imagine.

It's kind of funny. I was discussing this in a poker room chat window last night. A guy was asking me about exactly this.

We just don't have enough information at the moment to determine if our universe is steady state (will continue to expand forever) or oscillatory (bang/crunch). The parameter involved in the calculation, the critical density, Ω,of the universe is just known too roughly to know.

Astronomy is a very macroscopic science. A lot of approximations are done. And I mean A LOT. "Fudge factors" are everywhere. You hear "first order" a lot, meaning they only take into account most of the information available. As a past astronomy professor told the class (not as a joke), "The data matched that of the team in Chile to within a factor of 80, and that's pretty much equal to 1, so it worked out fine". That is an extreme example, but is indicative of just how rough astronomy can be. So when we need to know something pretty exactly in (specifically) cosmology, it's very difficult to accomplish and with modern day technology/science/maths etc, finding an accurate value for Ω is virtually impossible.

[JD]

Originally Posted by Hesla

I have spent many a night pondering these things and getting frustrated... good thing i found alchohol to tame these thoughts... mmmmm beer.

... and divert your attention to matters of greater importance, like why the black squirrels are so much worse than the regular kind.

[Cowperson]

One of my favourite "lay awake at night staring at the ceiling" questions is:

"What lies beyond the universe?"

Other universes? Other big bangs? To infinity?

Cowperson

[evman150]

Originally Posted by Cowperson

One of my favourite "lay awake at night staring at the ceiling" questions is:

"What lies beyond the universe?"

Other universes? Other big bangs? To infinity?

Cowperson

"Staring into the abyss, at the edge of forever, I contemplated what existed beyond."

"How can we be sure our whole universe is nothing but a uranium atom undergoing nuclear fission in some kind of Cosmic Hiroshima?"

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."

[comrade]

Originally Posted by evman150

It's kind of funny. I was discussing this in a poker room chat window last night. A guy was asking me about exactly this.

We just don't have enough information at the moment to determine if our universe is steady state (will continue to expand forever) or oscillatory (bang/crunch). The parameter involved in the calculation, the critical density, Ω,of the universe is just known too roughly to know.

I believe you're a little behind the times. Starting in the nineties there were several observations suggesting that the universe's expansion is accelerating. It is now generally accepted that the universe's expansion is accelerating.

[evman150]

Originally Posted by comrade

I believe you're a little behind the times. Starting in the nineties there were several observations suggesting that the universe's expansion is accelerating. It is now generally accepted that the universe's expansion is accelerating.

Just because it is accelerating does not mean it will not stop.

The chance of an oscillatory universe is still most definitely out there.

[sebbie]

I know im gonna regret asking this question because the answere will probably be obvious. but the first paragraph of the article says the universe expanded from the size of a marble to the volume of all visable space in 1 trillionth of a second. i dont know the speed of light but wouldnt this be faster then the speed of light, hence impossible?

{crosses fingers} please dont be painfully obvious

edit: crap is this a scientology article?

[comrade]

Originally Posted by sebbie

I know im gonna regret asking this question because the answere will probably be obvious. but the first paragraph of the article says the universe expanded from the size of a marble to the volume of all visable space in 1 trillionth of a second. i dont know the speed of light but wouldnt this be faster then the speed of light, hence impossible?

{crosses fingers} please dont be painfully obvious

edit: crap is this a scientology article?

No, I don't think its a scientology article. Anyway, I think the answer to your question is that space wasn't moving, it was expanding, or "growing". The distance between two objects became larger because there was more space in between them, not because they were moving faster than the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light through space, but that has nothing to do with the expansion of space. A decent analogy is two points on a deflated balloon; if you blow up the balloon, the points don't really travel away from each other the space between them grows.