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The paradox is that a static, infinitely old universe with an infinite number of stars distributed in an infinitely large space would be bright rather than dark. [1] A view of a square section of four concentric shells. To show this, we divide the universe into a series of concentric shells, 1 light year thick.
One of the unanswered questions about the universe is whether it is infinite or finite in extent. For intuition, it can be understood that a finite universe has a finite volume that, for example, could be in theory filled with a finite amount of material, while an infinite universe is unbounded and no numerical volume could possibly fill it.
The argument fails in the case that the universe might be shaped like the surface of a hypersphere or torus. (Consider a similar fallacious argument that the Earth's surface must be infinite in area: because otherwise one could go to the Earth's edge and throw a javelin, proving that the Earth's surface continued wherever the javelin hit the ...
The physical universe is defined as all of space and time [a] (collectively referred to as spacetime) and their contents. [10] Such contents comprise all of energy in its various forms, including electromagnetic radiation and matter, and therefore planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space.
In cosmology, a static universe (also referred to as stationary, infinite, static infinite or static eternal) is a cosmological model in which the universe is both spatially and temporally infinite, and space is neither expanding nor contracting. Such a universe does not have so-called spatial curvature; that is to say that it is 'flat' or ...
Because the universe is expanding, is smaller in the past and larger in the future. Extrapolating back in time with certain cosmological models will yield a moment when the scale factor was zero; our current understanding of cosmology sets this time at 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years ago. If the universe continues to expand forever, the scale ...
The curvature of the universe can be measured through multipole moments in the spectrum of the cosmic background radiation. To date, analysis of the radiation patterns recorded by the WMAP spacecraft hints that the universe has a flat topology. This would be consistent with an infinite physical universe. [52] [53] [54] However, the universe ...
The universe could then consist of an infinite sequence of finite universes, with each finite universe ending with a Big Crunch that is also the Big Bang of the next universe. A problem with the cyclic universe is that it does not reconcile with the second law of thermodynamics , as entropy would build up from oscillation to oscillation and ...