For thousands of years it was believed that our Universe was finite. In 1920, The Great Debate, also called the Shapley-Curtis Debate happened in Washington where Shapley argued that our Milky Way was the only galaxy in the Universe and Curtis argued that there were many other galaxies in the Universe but none of the opponents had any concrete evidence to prove their respective theories. However, in 1929 Edwin Hubble provided observational evidence from which he concluded that there was millions of galaxies in the Universe beside our Milky Way Galaxy. And in the process of discovering, he also found out that our Galaxy was in fact expanding! The public formation of the Great Debate influenced the ways ideas were presented and it ultimately lead to the trajectory of the Debate. This paper argues why Shapley believed that there is only one Galaxy and how Edwin Hubble proved him wrong with his discovery of the expanding Universe. From this discovery, we came to realize that at some point in the past, our Universe was very small, probably a tiny dot, then after the Big Bang, it started expanding. This was a big discovery, which changed the history of Physics. At the end, the paper also discusses - if our Universe will continue to expand or is there a limit?
Expansion of the Universe
Firstly, it is important to understand what we understand by the Expansion of the Universe. It means that the galaxies outside our own galaxy are moving away from us and the ones that are farther apart are moving even faster. Therefore it means that no matter where we are, all the other galaxies are moving away from us. And if it continues to do so, after a time, these galaxies would expand to infinity. We still have very little knowledge about the ot...
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... Universe expand forever?” http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) “The Expanding Universe” http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/astro/universe/universe.asp The General Education Astronomy Source (GEAS) (2006) “The Shapley-Curtis Debate – What is our Place in the Universe?” New Mexico State University http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/geas/lectures/lecture27/slide01.html Zabludoff .(2012) “A Great Debate: Shapley vs. Curtis and the Scale of the Universe (1920)”. The University of Arizona http://atropos.as.arizona.edu/aiz/teaching/a250/shapley_curtis.html Cary Sneider, “1929: Edwin Hubble Discovers the Universe is Expanding”, Carnegie Institute for Science http://cosmology.carnegiescience.edu/timeline/1929 Swara Ravindranath, "Edwin Powell Hubble", March 2009, pp. 211-213
http://simplelink.library.utoronto.ca/url.cfm/416978
In Alan Lightman’s, “Our Place in the Universe,” he describes his experiences in the Greek Isles explaining how meek it made him feel to be surrounded by the vast ocean with no land in sight except a small strip of brown in the distance. Great thinkers throughout history, have been exploring the visible variety of shapes, colors, and sizes, though the greatest of these are size, from the smallest atom to gargantuan stars. These massive differences in size change the way we view ourselves in the universe. (470) Garth Illingworth, from the University of California, has studied galaxies more than 13 billion light years away from us.
In the last hundred years we have made enormous progress in studying not our galaxy but ones billions of light-years away. Only a few hundred years ago our world seemed so big that there were areas of the world that had never been charted and people believed that the Earth was flat (and yes for some reason a few people still believe that today). If we continue to make progress at thus rate the universe will actually begin to seem smaller because of how much more we might know.
Two men named Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis has a debate in 1920 that is still important today for changing how we think about galaxies. They talked about five important things. The first thing they debated was how big our galaxy, the Milky Way, is. Shapley said that the Milky Way was much bigger than we first thought, 100,000 light-years across, and that, because it was that big, it had to be the only one. Curtis said the the Milky Way was smaller than that, and that other galaxies existed past ours. They were both right and both wrong. Shapley was right about the size of the Milky Way, and Curtis was right about there being many more galaxies in the universe.
Throughout history there has always been discussions and theories as to how the universe came to be. Where did it come from? How did it happen? Was it through God that the universe was made? These philosophies have been discussed and rejected and new theories have been created. I will discuss three theories from our studies, Kalam’s Cosmological Argument, Aquinas’s Design Argument, and Paley’s Design Argument. In this article, I will discuss the arguments and what these arguments state as their belief. A common belief from these three theories is that the universe is not infinite, meaning that the universe was created and has a beginning date. Each believe that there was a God, deity, or master creator that created the universe for a reason. They also believe that
The Big Bang theory is a theory that states that the universe originated as a single mass, which subsequently exploded. The entire universe was once all in a hot and dense ball, but about 20 million years ago, it exploded. This explosion hurled material all over the place and all mater and space was created at that point in time. The gas that was hurled out cooled and became our stellar system. A red shift is a shift towards longer wavelengths of celestial objects. An example of this is the "Doppler shift." Doppler shift is what makes a car sound lower-pitched as it moves further away. As it turns out, a special version of this everyday life effect applies to light as well. If an astronomical object is moving away from the Earth, its light will be shifted to longer (red) wavelengths. This is significant because this theory indicates the speed of recession of galaxies and the distances between galaxies.
Hawking, Stephen. “Our Picture of the Universe.” Fields of Reading. 6th ed. Ed. Nancy R. Comely et al. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001. (565-574)
An underlying theme present throughout the series is the possibility that our existence is not the only one. According to current theories in physics, it is entirely possible that our universe is just one of many universes f...
The Big Bang Theory is one of the most important, and most discussed topics in cosmology today. As such, it encompasses several smaller components that attempt to explain what happened in the moments after creation, and how the universe we know today came from such a fiery, chaotic universe in the wake of the Big Bang. One major component of the Big Bang theory is nucleosynthesis. We know that several stellar phenomena (including stellar fusion and various types of super novae) are responsible for the formation of all heavy elements up through Plutonium, however, after the advent of the Big Bang theory, we needed a way to explain what types of matter were created to form the earliest stars.!
Hoyle, Fred From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology San Francisco 1972 On Stonehenge San Francisco 1977
Waller, William H. The Milky Way: An Insider's Guide. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 2013. 42+. Print.
...t is that human reasoning abilities have allowed mankind to develop a virtual telescope far beyond the reach of our newest space viewing technologies. With this theory, humans come closer to realizing our place within the multiverse and the uniqueness of our own universe. The conflicting ideas, though difficult to prove one way or another, provide an impetus that will stimulate further research into this field, opening new doors and potentially useful technologies that could further humans’ understanding of everything on which our knowledge rests.
Two galaxies which are believed to revolve around our own are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. Only visible from the Southern Hemisphere, Magellan, the famous European explorer, was the first to describe these galaxies. Even though we know a great amount more than the astronomers in the past, there is still an even larger amount we do not know about the universe to this day. Even our own solar system contains many questions yet to be answered. Some of these include the possibility of a planet beyond Pluto (Planet X), the means by which the system was created, and even the possibility of a sister star to the Sun named Nemesis.
The Universe is a collection of millions of galaxies and extends beyond human imagination. After the big bang, the universe was found to be composed of radiation and subatomic particles. Information following big bang is arguable on how galaxies formed, that is whether small particles merged to form clusters and eventually galaxies or whether the universe systematized as immense clumps of matter that later fragmented into galaxies (Nasa World book, 2013). A galaxy is a massive area of empty space full of dust, gases (mainly 75% Hydrogen and 25%Helium), atoms, about 100-200 billion stars, interstellar clouds and planets, attracted to the center by gravitational force of attraction. Based on recent research, 170 billion galaxies have been estimated to exist, with only tens of thousands been discovered (Deutsch, 2011).
The big bang theory is an attempt to explain how the world began. The big bang theory begins with what is called a “singularity.” This term is used to describe an area in space which defies all the known laws of physics. Singularities are thought to exist at the core of black holes. Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure. The pressure is thought to be so intense that matter is pressed together into an infinite amount of pressure. The dense hot mass of the singularity slowly expanded. This process is called inflation. As the singularity expanded the universe went from dense and hot to cool and expansive. Inflation is still continuing on today which means that the universe is continually expanding.
This is probably the greatest discovery imaginable; however, the universe still seems to be a very controversial subject.