Questions tagged [cosmology]
The study of the large-scale structure, history, and future of the universe. Cosmology is about asking and answering questions about the "big picture" - the extent, origin, and fate of everything we know.
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Did the Big Bang happen at a point?
TV documentaries invariably show the Big Bang as an exploding ball of fire expanding outwards. Did the Big Bang really explode outwards from a point like this? If not, what did happen?
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If I sliced the universe in half, would the slice go through a star?
This question is based on a discussion with a 10-year old. So if it is not clear how to interpret certain details, imagine how a 10-year old would interpret them.
This 10-year old does not know about ...
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Why does space expansion not expand matter?
I have looked at other questions on this site (e.g. "why does space expansion affect matter") but can't find the answer I am looking for.
So here is my question: One often hears talk of space ...
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Why are some people are claiming that the Big Bang never happened?
A news story is going viral on social media networks claiming that two physicists have found a way to eliminate the Big Bang singularity, or in layman's terms (as claimed by many sensationalist news ...
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Why do scientists think that all the laws of physics that apply in our galaxy apply in other galaxies?
I like watching different videos about space. I keep seeing all these videos saying scientists found so and so at 200 billion light years away or this happened 13 billion years ago.
My question is ...
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Why didn't the Big Bang create heavy elements?
In the case of a supernova explosion it is possible to create heavy elements through fusion. Supernovae have a tremendous amount of energy in a very small volume but not as much energy per volume as ...
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What does one second after big bang mean?
Consider the following statement:
Hadron Epoch, from $10^{-6}$ seconds to $1$ second: The temperature of the
universe cools to about a trillion degrees, cool enough to allow
quarks to combine ...
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What does general relativity say about the relative velocities of objects that are far away from one another?
What does general relativity say about the relative velocities of objects that are far away from one another? In particular:--
Can distant galaxies be moving away from us at speeds faster than $c$? ...
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Why isn't an infinite, flat, nonexpanding universe filled with a uniform matter distribution a solution to Einstein's equation?
In Newtonian gravity, an infinite volume filled with a uniform distribution of mass would be in perfect equilibrium. At every point, the gravitational forces contributed by masses in one direction ...
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What was the major discovery on gravitational waves made March 17th, 2014, in the BICEP2 experiment?
The Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics held a press conference today to announce a major discovery relating to gravitational waves. What was their announcement, and what are the implications?
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Is the total energy of the universe zero?
In popular science books and articles, I keep running into the claim that the total energy of the Universe is zero, "because the positive energy of matter is cancelled out by the negative energy of ...
user1265
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Is the CMB rest frame special? Where does it come from?
It seems that we are moving relative to the universe at the speed of ~ 600 km/s.
This is the speed of our galaxy relative to the cosmic microwave background.
Where does this rest frame come from? Is ...
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Could the observable universe be bigger than the universe?
First of all, I'm a layman to cosmology. So please excuse the possibly oversimplified picture I have in mind.
I was wondering how we could know that the observable universe is only a fraction of the ...
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Can space expand with unlimited speed?
According to this article on the European Space Agency web site just after the Big Bang and before inflation the currently observable universe was the size of a coin. One millionth of a second later ...
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Why is the observable universe so big?
The observable universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old. But yet it is 80 billion light years across. Isn't this a contradiction?
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What if the universe is rotating as a whole?
Suppose in the milliseconds after the big bang the cosmic egg had aquired some large angular momentum. As it expanded, keeping the momentum constant (not external forces) the rate of rotation would ...
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Are we inside a black hole?
I was surprised to only recently notice that
An object of any density can be large enough to fall within its own
Schwarzschild radius.
Of course! It turns out that supermassive black holes at ...
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How do different definitions of entropy connect with each other?
In many places over the Internet, I have tried to understand entropy.
Many definitions are presented, among which I can formulate three (please correct me if any definition is wrong):
Entropy = ...
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Does the universe have a center? [duplicate]
If the big bang was the birth of everything, and the big bang was an event in the sense that it had a location and a time (time 0), wouldn't that mean that our universe has a center?
Where was the ...
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Why is hydrogen the most abundant element in the Universe?
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in nature. Does cosmological nucleosynthesis provide an explanation for why is this the case? Is the explanation quantitatively precise?
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How do we know Dark Matter isn't simply Neutrinos?
What evidence is there that dark matter isn't one of the known types of neutrinos?
If it were, how would this be measurable?
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Red shifted to what?
I searched and found a lot of questions and answers about red shift here but none with the answer to mine. (sorry if it is there somewhere and I did not find it.)
Everyone is saying the light from ...
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Are modified theories of gravity credible?
I'm a statistician with a little training in physics and would just like to know the general consensus on a few things.
I'm reading a book by John Moffat which basically tries to state how GR makes ...
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Why isn't dark matter just ordinary matter?
There's more gravitational force in our galaxy (and others) than can be explained by counting stars made of ordinary matter. So why not lots of dark planetary systems (i.e., without stars) made of ...
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How would we tell antimatter galaxies apart?
Given that antimatter galaxies are theoretically possible,
how would they be distinguishable from regular matter galaxies?
That is, antimatter is equal in atomic weight and all properties, except for ...
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Dumbed-down explanation how scientists know the number of atoms in the universe?
It is often quoted that the number of atoms in the universe is 10$^{70}$ or 10$^{80}$.
How do scientists determine this number?
And how accurate is it (how strong is the supporting evidences for it)...
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Why does a flat universe imply an infinite universe?
This article claims that because the universe appears to be flat, it must be infinite. I've heard this idea mentioned in a few other places, but they never explain the reasoning at all.
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Is topology of universe observable?
There is an idea that the geometry of physical space is not observable(i.e. it can't be fixed by mere observation). It was introduced by H. Poincare. In brief it says that we can formulate our ...
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Is light actually faster than what our present measurements tell us?
It is well established that the light speed in a perfect vacuum is roughly $3\times 10^8 \:\rm m/s$. But it is also known that outer space is not a perfect vacuum, but a hard vacuum. So, is the speed ...
user182521
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How can interstellar space have a temperature of 2-3K?
Several different sources online state that the average temperature of interstellar space (or the universe in general) is around 2-3K.
I learned that temperature is basically the wiggling of matter, ...
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What are galactic speeds measured against?
The Earth moves through space at 67,000 MPH. The Milky Way travels through a local group at 2,237,000 MPH.
Wouldn't you need a fixed point to be able to measure velocity against? After all, compared ...
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Is the Big Bang defined as before or after Inflation?
Is the Big Bang defined as before or after Inflation? Seems like a simple enough question to answer right? And if just yesterday I were to encounter this, I'd have given a definite answer. But I've ...
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What are the alternative theories of dark energy? ($w \neq -1$)
There has been a lot of related questions about dark energy around here but these are usually 2-4 years old and the closest question to mine hasn't really been answered, so I am going to proceed. ...
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How can it be that the beginning universe had a high temperature and a low entropy at the same time?
The Big Bang theory assumes that our universe started from a very/infinitely dense and extremely/infinitely hot state. But on the other side, it is often claimed that our universe must have been ...
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Could gravity be an emergent property of nature?
Sorry if this question is naive. It is just a curiosity that I have.
Are there theoretical or experimental reasons why gravity should not be an emergent property of nature?
Assume a standard model ...
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If string theory is inconsistent with observations, why hasn't it been rejected yet?
I'm no expert on string theory, but I've been reading about it. I've been quite surprised because of how it appears to be inconsistent with observations, but hasn't been rejected yet. Examples:
On the ...
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The age of the universe
Many times I have read statements like, "the age of the universe is 14 billion years" . For example this wikipedia page Big Bang.
Now, my question is, which observers' are these time intervals? ...
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Do the laws of physics evolve?
Hubble's constant $a(t)$ appears to be changing over time. The fine stucture constant $\alpha$, like many others in QFT, is a running constant that varies, proportional to energy being used to measure ...
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The Pioneer anomaly finally explained?
Pioneer 10 & 11 are robotic space probes launched by the NASA in the early 1970's. After leaving our solar system, an unusual deceleration of both spacecrafts has been measured to be approximately ...
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Why was the universe in an extraordinarily low-entropy state right after the big bang?
Let me start by saying that I have no scientific background whatsoever. I am very interested in science though and I'm currently enjoying Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. I'm at chapter 7 and ...
Kristof Claes
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Is space really expanding?
In a book called "Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity" there was this sentence by Smith:
There is no observational evidence for a space expansion hypothesis. What is observed are ...
user311398
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Is the law of conservation of energy still valid?
Is the law of conservation of energy still valid or have there been experiments showing that energy could be created or lost?
user11151
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If spacetime itself is expanding, how could we ever tell?
If space is the measured distance between 2 objects, then saying the space expanded is nonsensical unless we have a measuring stick outside of the space fabric to measure the expansion. 2 objects ...
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Sympletic structure of General Relativity
Inspired by physics.SE: Does the dimensionality of phase space go up as the universe expands?
It made me wonder about symplectic structures in GR, specifically, is there something like a Louiville ...
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Why haven't we seen the big bang?
The Andromeda galaxy is 2,538,000 light years away, so if we view Andromeda from a telescope, we see Andromeda how it was 2,538,000 years ago. Now the diameter of the visible universe is 92 billion ...
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Why is the Cosmic Microwave Background evidence of a hotter, denser early universe?
In his book Gravitation and Cosmology, Steven Weinberg says that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) makes it "difficult to doubt that the universe has evolved from a hotter, denser early stage&...
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What does the cosmic neutrino background look like today, given that neutrinos possess mass?
This question is inspired by (or a follow-up to) the threads Where are all the slow neutrinos? and Is it possible that all “spontaneous nuclear decay” is actually “slow neutrino” induced?
The cosmic ...
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What does the concept of an "infinite universe" actually mean?
When physicists talk about the universe being infinite, or wondering whether it is or not, what do these two options actually mean? I am not interested whether the universe is infinite or not, I am ...
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Is the universe finite or infinite?
I thought the universe was finite, but then I read this:
How can something finite become infinite?
And they seem to assume it is infinite. So which is it?
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Is space "real", or is it some sort of accepted postulate?
What is space?
It seems to be everywhere in the equations of physics, as some sort of postulate or hidden hypothesis. We also have a direct experience of it, but is it "real"? The fact that we ...
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