Our universe is one surrounded by mystery, however, one thing is for certain: each moment, entire sections of our universe are disappearing. While these areas aren’t just evaporating into thin air, they are instead being pushed out of the Universe and into what scientists refer to as the known and unobservable universe.
Humans have always been fascinated by the seemingly endless expanse of the Universe. Throughout our journey of trying to understand the cosmos, we have questioned whether this universe just goes on forever or does it have an edge or an end. Isaac Newton provided us with new insights about the Universe in 1687 when he proposed to us the universal law of gravitation.
Credit: NASA / GSFC)
According to Newton’s work, if our Universe was finite, the forces of the objects that are found in t would cause everything to collapse in on itself. Because this has not happened, Newton theorized that the Universe was infinite.
However, due to Olber’s paradox, scientists realized there had to be more. Wilheim Olber believed that because the sky was dark at night, the Universe could not truly be infinite. When stars begin to die and become dimmer and dimmer, they cause dark patches in the sky. Olber believed that it was due to this very paradox that it was not likely that our Universe was infinite.
Later, Vesto Slipher analyzed the spectral lines of faraway galaxies and found the light they emitted was shifted toward the red end of the light spectrum. It was at this time, that we began to realize that there was evidence that galaxies are moving away from us, thus our Universe is disappearing. Later, Edwin Hubble compounded on Slipher’s work and measured the galaxies’ redshifts and compared them with their relative distance. It was at this time that he realized that the Universe was expanding.
However, this very expansion is what is causing us to lose chunks of our Universe. Because the universe will never stop expanding, one day, this expansion into the ‘dark cosmos’ is exactly what will cause our Universe to disappear entirely.