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by Dropped One on August 11th, 2009
That is right if a galaxy suddenly disappeared we would not know right away.
But we do know that the universe is currently expanding and not collapsing at least for now.
We know this because of what is called the red shift and that is as an object moves further away its color shifts towards the red portion of the light spectrum.
If the universe began collapsing we would see a blue shift or a shift of the color of the object toward the blue end of the spectrum.
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How far away from us are the stars of the Big Dipper?
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Barf was half idiot and half dog. But how did Lonestar treat the poor animal?
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by einsteinwasright0116 on October 31st, 2011
| 1 person likes this
You're reading Light travels according to a speed so since sight is the fastest way to detect a change then how do we know if the universe hasn't begun collapsing on itself? If the nearest star galaxy suddenly disappeared, we wouldn't know immediately right?
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Comments
You could argue that the blue shift simply hasn't reached us yet.
I think one thing is that the current evidence points not only to expansion, but to an accelerating rate of expansion. And we see evidence of this both near and far away, which means that even locally, fairly near in time, we are still seeing expansion, which is consistent with the expansion we see very far away (in time and distance). So this leads us to the conclusion that the expansion has been happening for a very long time, is happening almost certainly now, and will for an indefinite time in the future.
by yeroco on August 11th, 2009