"One of the most difficult concepts for anyone - even a professional astrophysicist - to wrap their minds around is the idea of the Big Bang and the expanding Universe. Off in the far-flung distance, at the limit of what even our most powerful telescopes can see, are galaxies speeding away from us so quickly that the light their stars emitted has been stretched to as much as twelve times their original wavelength."
"These stretched light waves are a consequence of the expanding Universe, and they are nearly, but not quite, identical for galaxies that we see in all directions in space. Does that difference, and the fact that one direction has a slightly greater redshift for its objects than the opposite direction, tell us anything about where, all those billions of years ago, the Big Bang actually occurred?"
Galaxies exhibit a consistent relationship between measured redshift and distance: greater distances correspond to greater redshifts, with inferred recession speed proportional to distance (Hubble's law). This pattern appears nearly isotropic, holding in all directions, though small directional differences can exist. The stretching of light wavelengths arises from the expansion of space, not from motion through a preexisting space toward or away from a single center. Because expansion occurs everywhere and looks the same to any observer, directional redshift variations do not identify a unique spatial origin for the Big Bang. Interpreting redshift and blueshift signs differently does not change this cosmological symmetry.
Read at Big Think
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]