Tech UPTechnologyDoes the universe have a center?

Does the universe have a center?

 

The Big Bang was the ‘bang’ that started it all. Explosions have a nerve center, so we could assume that our universe does too, right? Well, the truth is that no, the universe does not have a ‘heart’. Rather we could say that the center of the universe is everywhere.

 

Is there no center of the universe?

If the universe started with the Big Bang and has been expanding ever since, but there is no center for the expansion, if the center would be everywhere, how do we explain this? The problem is that we humans visualize the Big Bang as a typical explosion, as we know it, in which matter radiates everywhere from a nucleus after the explosion; but it is that the Big Bang should not be seen as an ordinary explosion. The universe does not expand from a center out into space; rather, the entire universe is expanding and is doing so everywhere equally , as far as astronomers know.

The region of space that we can see is the observable universe. When we look in any direction across the cosmos, we are seeing light left behind by stars millions and even billions of years ago. At 13.7 billion light-years, we would be looking at light that was emitted shortly after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled to the point of becoming transparent. In this way, the observable universe would be a sphere around you.

Everything is related to our position. If we are in a dark room holding a candle because the light has gone out in the entire building, we will see that before us, we have a sphere of light. We would be in the center of our observable universe. If we were in a different place, we would have a different observable sphere. The conclusion? Each object is at the center of its own personal observable universe, hence we can say that the observable universe is the sphere around us relative to our position.

Where is the real center of the universe, regardless of who is observing it?

For a central point to exist, that point would have to be special in some way to the universe as a whole. One way to define a center would be to identify some object or feature that exists only at one point, such as a supermassive black hole or a nebula of titanic proportions. But observations indicate that all types of objects are randomly scattered throughout the universe.

Thus, no matter which direction we look, or how far away our telescopes and instruments are able to see, the universe looks more or less the same. The number or type of galaxies, the populations of stars, normal matter and dark matter… are all uniform. Each point can be considered as the “center” of this expansion, so the heart of the universe is nowhere, and everywhere at once.

Therefore, although there is still much we do not know about our cosmos, what we are sure of is that the universe is expanding, the radiation that travels through it is being stretched to longer wavelengths, it is becoming less dense and that more distant objects appear as they were in the past.

Referencia: A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1
Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team
Adam G. Riess,1, 2 Wenlong Yuan,2 Lucas M. Macri,3 Dan Scolnic,4 Dillon Brout,5 Stefano Casertano,1
David O. Jones,6 Yukei Murakami,2 Gagandeep S. Anand,1 Louise Breuval,2, 7 Thomas G. Brink,8
Alexei V. Filippenko,8, 9 Samantha Hoffmann,1 Saurabh W. Jha,10 W. D’arcy Kenworthy,2 John Mackenty,1
Benjamin E. Stahl,8 and WeiKang Zheng arXiv:2112.04510v3 [astro-ph.CO] 18 Jul 2022

IS THE UNIVERSE EXPANDING? FRITZ ZWICKY AND EARLY TIRED-LIGHT HYPOTHESES Helge Kragh Niels Bohr Institute, B Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 20(1), 2–12 (2017)

What´s eating the universe? Paul Davies, University of Chicago Press 2021 How Many Universes Do There Need To Be? Douglas Scott, J.P. Zibin International Journal of Modern Physics D 2006 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218271806009662

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