you want nasa's website? http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/070904a.html

you can google that shit, youre not going to find anything that says otherwise. im not looking up journals for you though if thats what youre asking for, you can do it yourself

If universe is infinite, how can it expand.

I guess the obvious answer is that the universe is not infinite. Studies estimate the universe is around 93 billion light years in diameter.

If the universe is expanding at the speed of light on one direction, and expanding at the speed of light in the exact opposite direction, than from one end to the other relativetive to each other, they appear expanding at twice the speed of light (relatively speaking). This is not the same as expanding at faster than the speed of light. Sorry to Say, but you are completely misunderstanding the articles you posted and the basic ideas in general.

Fact is, nothing can travel faster than light. The Recent Nutrino experiment that sugested a 6 nano second paradox, itself is now being reviewed due to faulty instrument discovery.



Excellent point

I think the inferrence is "The observable Univererse is expanding into the empty void of the infinate universe"

This post was edited by FullArcFG on Mar 4 2012 10:11am

Actually not exactly. The universe isnt just expanding faster than light relative to the otherside of the universe, it's actually expanding faster than light (and accelerating). It doesnt violate relativity, though. If you think of the universe as a graph, and planets/galaxies as points on the graph, the cooridinates of the graph are what's expanding.

Another analogy is if you draw two dots on a balloon, and inflated the balloon, the way the dots expand is comparible to the way galaxies expand. So you can almost think of it as the space is increasing. And this expansion occurs faster than light.


And for the record, information can also travel faster than light. So dont say "nothing" can travel faster than light.

/edit - just double checked with the nasa site and they say:

" it is space itself that is expanding faster than the speed of light, driving objects further apart at an increasing rate"



universe expansion refers to the expansion of the "known universe", which is like the galaxies and shit



They think the universe is either an infinite plane (so like infinite on x , y direction, finite on the z axis) or a finite torus. Also we'll probably never know for sure which one it is

This post was edited by novocane on Mar 4 2012 03:52pm

I say give it 10-15 years and we'll have a pretty good grasp concerning the universe. I'm actually interested in if they can prove our universe is one of many

If I deflate a balloon so it loses volume at a rate which is slower than the expansion of the universe, is the balloon expanding or contracting?

Dark matter isnt hypothesised because of the expansion, but rather because of the fact stars comprise only 10% of the mass of the universe.

Dark energy is what is supposedly held responsible for the ever-accelerating expansion of the universe.

This post was edited by sevlo on Mar 6 2012 10:25am

i wonder how they calculated that

i thought dark matter had something to do with the spins of galaxies, but i'm not particularly well versed in cosmology

There is another theory, not sure how to put it but will try.

That basically the universe is not expanding at an accelrating rate, but instead during the period of the big bang time was much more quicker. When we measure universes far away from us, we see them moving faster away from us therefore we assume that expansion msut be speeding up. Infact what we are looking at is a period in which time was moving quicker than current time. Anyways Theory goes that eventally time will come go to a grinding halt as it gets slower and slower.

Sorry if I suck at explaining it.