Big Bang and the Speed at Which the Universe Expands

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Does the universe expand at a speed greater than the speed of light, or at the speed of light?
 
Boulder257 said:
Does the universe expand at a speed greater than the speed of light, or at the speed of light?
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That question can’t really be answered, because the speed of light refers to how fast light is traveling through the “fabric” of the universe, while the expansion of the universe refers to the “stretching” of that “fabric.”
 
DaveBj said:
That question can’t really be answered, because the speed of light refers to how fast light is traveling through the “fabric” of the universe, while the expansion of the universe refers to the “stretching” of that “fabric.”
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Gotcha, thanks.
 
Nelka said:
Who says it expands?
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The Catholic priest and physicist George Lemaître, for example. He proposed the theory.
Why would God need to continually expand it at a certain rate?
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That question makes about as much sense as “Why would God need to continually rotate Earth around its own core?”…
 
Boulder has a science Question :** “Does the universe expand at a speed greater than the speed of light, or at the speed of light?”**

Others, have said that nothing travels faster than the Speed of Light.
I say that no matter can travel at (or even very near) the Speed of Light.

I heard, years ago that the Universe (or, at least parts of it) was expanding at about HALF the Speed of Light.

A couple of years ago, I heard that the Universe was expanding quite a bit faster than scientists formerly thought.
Of course, in this age of news programs, that don’t give ANY specifics of the story anymore, they offered up NO new speed of expansion.
(Thanks CNN, and NBC, and CBS, and you too ABC.)
 
What scientists say is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

This can be determined by observing through telescopes that galaxies are moving farther away from each other as time passes. There is no explanation for that other than as the phenomenon of expansion. Some physicists speculate that if Earth and Man could exist a few billion more years (not likely) you could look up into the sky and see no stars, the distance between galaxies being so great. Thus, as the universe began with a burst of light, it will end in universal darkness.
 
Charlemagne_III said:
What scientists say is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

This can be determined by observing through telescopes that galaxies are moving farther away from each other as time passes. There is no explanation for that other than as the phenomenon of expansion. Some physicists speculate that if Earth and Man could exist a few billion more years (not likely) you could look up into the sky and see no stars, the distance between galaxies being so great. Thus, as the universe began with a burst of light, it will end in universal darkness.
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At one point I thought I had found the force that was causing the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. I was sub-teaching here in Alabama, and I put a fact into the left ear of a middle-schooler, but I saw that fact fly out of his right ear before I had put it into his left ear. At that point I thought, “Wow, I’ve just discovered what’s speeding the expansion up!” 😃

The farthest objects that we have yet seen are on the order of 13 billion light-years away, which means that we are seeing them as and where they were 13 billion years ago. Cosmologists say that those objects are now something like 40 billion light-years away.
 
Charlemagne_III said:
What scientists say is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

This can be determined by observing through telescopes that galaxies are moving farther away from each other as time passes. There is no explanation for that other than as the phenomenon of expansion. Some physicists speculate that if Earth and Man could exist a few billion more years (not likely) you could look up into the sky and see no stars, the distance between galaxies being so great. Thus, as the universe began with a burst of light, it will end in universal darkness.
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Unless it begins to contract again. But I guess that can’t happen unless there is enough mass in the universe to slow down the expansion.

Since space has a positive curvature, one should in theory at least, be able to start out from earth in any direction traveling in a straight line, and eventually end up right back where you started, just like circumnavigating the globe. It would take billions of years of course, and if the universe expansion is accelerating, it would be like trying to circumnavigate a globe that keeps getting bigger. You might never make it back!
 
JimG said:
Unless it begins to contract again. But I guess that can’t happen unless there is enough mass in the universe to slow down the expansion.

Since space has a positive curvature, one should in theory at least, be able to start out from earth in any direction traveling in a straight line, and eventually end up right back where you started, just like circumnavigating the globe. It would take billions of years of course, and if the universe expansion is accelerating, it would be like trying to circumnavigate a globe that keeps getting bigger. You might never make it back!
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I read once where one astronomer (don’t remember his name, but I think he was British) said that it wouldn’t surprise him to look through a telescope one day and find out that he was looking at his own backside 😛
 
4love2God said:
Others, have said that nothing travels faster than the Speed of Light.
I say that no matter can travel at (or even very near) the Speed of Light.

I heard, years ago that the Universe (or, at least parts of it) was expanding at about HALF the Speed of Light.
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I think there may be a distinction to be made between “travelling” and “distance due to spacial expansion” that could have gotten conflated there.
 
"DaveBj:
The farthest objects that we have yet seen are on the order of 13 billion light-years away, which means that we are seeing them as and where they were 13 billion years ago. Cosmologists say that those objects are now something like 40 billion light-years away.
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Ah, thanks. That’s the thing I was missing in trying to understand why I did a search for the [radius of the known universe ](https://www.wolframalpha.com/(name removed by moderator)ut/?i=radius++of+observable+universe)that I Was getting back a number significant larger than I expected. I hadn’t taken into account the expansion.
Charlemagne III said:
Some physicists speculate that if Earth and Man could exist a few billion more years (not likely) you could look up into the sky and see no stars, the distance between galaxies being so great. Thus, as the universe began with a burst of light, it will end in universal darkness.
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I think that is called the horizon problem.
 
ThinkingSapien is thinking some Good homo sapiens point :** “there may be a distinction to be made between “travelling” and “distance due to spacial expansion” — that could have gotten conflated there.”**

After I read this, I just had a DUH Moment : … … DUH … … Uhhh … … OH … OH? … OH**!**

so … Yeah, I sort of Agree with ThinkingSapien.

Power to Conflation … may it Reign long and Proud.
 
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