837
James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
837 points (98.8% liked)
News
23376 readers
2030 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Seeing the universe expanding at different rates could just mean we're not as close to the center as we thought, and the parts further away from the center are moving faster. That's my layman's hypothesis though
We're not thought to be at the center at all.
We're at the center of what we can see. But that's just a limit of the speed of light and the age of the universe. The universe almost certainly goes beyond what we can see. And there's no way of knowing how big the universe is beyond that.
It's like being on a ship in the ocean. You can see the horizon is 20miles in every direction. That doesn't mean you're in the center of the ocean. You're only in the center of what you can... Sea
Kurzgesagt's latest video actually covers this. I found the hypotheses they covered pretty interesting.
I sea what you did there. Whale done.
There is no center of the universe fwiw, there is no middle everything is expanding out from. Just a substrate that exists everywhere that inflates
That's what I believe as well. AFAIK from what we know the universe could be infinite or simply bigger than the observable part. But I think the only reason people default to assuming that it's finite is that infinity is hard to grasp and that illustrations of the big bang show a point and then disks of expanding size. People assume that means the universe is a sphere but nothing contradicts what you say so there's no reason not to believe that it's infinite.
It's fun to think it might just start going backwards or something because we have literally no idea what is actually happening, like it's very possible we'll never actually be able to see or measure anything outside the universe but there could be all sorts of things going on.
It's a decent testable hypothesis. If there were a center. Which seems obvious in the familiar mechanical way of say a firecracker. It certainly has a center with debris going every direction from that point.
However (to use a problematic oversimplification): what if the universe has a similarity to the surface of a balloon being blown up, where is the center?
Wherever you put your finger, the whole rest of the surface of the balloon is expanding away from that point. One center point is earth. Every other place in the universe also appears to be a center.
When looking at the evidence, data from telescopes and such, describing the expansion of the universe is closer to the balloon surface theory than the firecracker theory. Even though the firecracker theory is easier to comprehend.
When people are talking about the center they mean the relative center, in other words, our point of reference. This definitionally is where we are as the observer.
There is no center.
Yes there is and it is me.
Can I have some money?
Loose the centre assumption and you are there.
Our section of the universe is not as uniform as it should be.