It is true that Human’s mind once stretched by a new idea, it never regains its original dimension. Coupled with the vastness and connivance of Cosmos, there is absolutely nothing that can limit a Human imagination.
Supposed beginning of Universe:
Big bang is how the astronomers believe the way Universe began structuring approximately 13.8 billion years ago, into an infinite space and time unit.
It caters to the idea that universe began as just a single point, which was extremely hot as it exploded, tiny particles mixed with light and energy. Then it began expanding and stretching to grow without limits and continues to do so.
Are we sure its expanding?
It got noticed by an astronomer named Edwin Hubble that other galaxies appeared to move away from us.
Additionally, it was the farthest galaxies those were moving faster than the ones closer to us indicating the Universe of still expanding. If the celestial objects could move apart now, it meant that in past, everything had been close together.
However, it is based on the Cosmological Principle that average densities of respective Galaxies are same throughout the Universe and is irrespective of change in direction or distance.
On the right hand: Homogeneous
In 1927, Georges Lemaître proposed the Big Bang Theory, highly accepted by most of Astronomers in his time but there has been a rebellion always regarding the Universe being isotropic (means to appear the same in every direction or viewing angle) and homogeneous (means “to be the same throughout,” no matter where you are in the universe) amongst a few Physicists and Astronomers.
And hence a research paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, undertaken by a group of scientists from the US, the UK, France and India.
The breath-taking Study:
Suggesting that the universe isn’t same in all directions, there are two independent research groups reporting that our universe has been expanding at an accelerating pace.
The two groups, each led by Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt, have observed distant type 1a supernovae – massive stars that had run out of fuel and exploded, with a fixed brightness for comprehensive study.
They along with Adam Riess, received Nobel Prize for physics in 2011 “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”.
To understand the pace of expansion better, the observations had to be read in the light of redshift or possible change in wavelength of the stretched light, caused due to the Doppler effect.
They found that Expansion of Universe is being driven by Dark energy and it was expanding faster than being anticipated.
The engine that started the Cosmic explosion has stopped for long but the Universe is still expanding known as cosmic inflation but we are more intrigued as to what fuels or drives this expansion?
Even another study in 2016 Last Contact even calculated the Universe expansion at 5-9% faster than accepted rate.
Composition of Universe holds the answer:
It has 68% of all the energy in form of dark energy, about 27% is dark matter and less than 5% constitutes all the normal matter.
Big Bang emitted some radiation that formed the very first neutral hydrogen atoms, still surfing across the Universe, termed as cosmic microwave background (CMB).
The CMB doesn’t seem to be isotropic. It is hotter in one direction in the sky and colder in the other, by a 1,000-times. This happens because of the motion of Earth at 369 km/s with respect to a reference frame in which the universe is supposed to be isotropic.
According to a participant in the study: “This suggests that the rest frame of matter and radiation do not coincide in the universe even on very large scales – hundreds of millions of light years or more”.
Another Study comparing and analyzing quasars found that the dipole of Quasars was in the same direction as the dipole of the CMB, again suggesting anisotropic nature of Universe as the difference was much higher- twice the expected value.
Why the revelation matters?
The cosmological indication implying that the universe is dominated by dark energy, will change the way we can visualize and understand the happenings of outer world. It will call for reformulation of most of the Cosmology that we know today.
The researchers around the World are planning to take this further. Some plan to use the sources of radio and infrared waves in the universe or the remodeling of Cosmological surveys, to refine their results.
We stand at a delicate juncture where we understand that everything in Universe seems corrigible with better observation and innate Human will to seek things.