It's true: the farther away we look, the greater we find a galaxy's redshift to be. But why is that? You may have heard the (correct) answer: because space is expanding. But how do we know that? Couldn't something else be causing this redshift?
The answer is yes, there are actually four other explanations for cosmic redshift that all make sense. But the beauty of science is that there are observational tests we can perform to tell these various scenarios apart! We've done those tests, of course, and concluded the Universe is expanding, but wouldn't you like to know how?
I bet you would! Come and find out how we know that cosmic redshift is caused by the expansion of the Universe, and learn where the alternatives fall apart.
"You might think that if we waited for an arbitrarily long amount of time, we'd be able to see an arbitrarily far distance, and that there would be no limit to how much of the Universe would become visible.
The Universe is a huge, vast, enormous place. It's been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang occurred, which translates into an observable Universe that's 46 billion light years to its edge, and contains some 2 trillion galaxies in various stages of evolutionary development. But that's not the end of what we'll ever be able to observe. As time goes on, light that's presently on its way to our eyes will eventually catch up, revealing a future visibility limit that's even larger than the present observable Universe. When we add it all up, we'll find that we more than double the number of galaxies we can observe, even though we can barely reach 1% of them.
How does this all work? Find out the limits of the observable and unobservable Universe today!
"This cosmic neutrino background (CNB) has been theorized to exist for practically as long as the Big Bang has been around, but has never been directly detected. Because neutrinos have such a tiny cross-section with other particles, we generally need them to be at very high energies in order to see them. The energy imparted to each neutrino leftover from the Big Bang corresponds to only 168 micro-electron-volts (μeV) today, while the neutrinos we can measure have many billions of times as much energy. No proposed experiments are theoretically capable of seeing them.
When we look at the Universe, one of our great cosmic quests is to go earlier than ever before. To the first galaxies, the first stars, the first atoms, and even earlier, if possible. That's how we put the best theories of our cosmic origins, like the Big Bang, to the ultimate test. The earliest observable signal from the classical Big Bang is a bath of neutrinos and antineutrinos, which froze-out when the Universe was just 1 second old. For generations, this was regarded as an undetectable prediction, but there are two ways that they might affect observable features of the Universe.
It's 2019, and we've now seen them both. The results? The cosmic neutrino background looks exactly like the Big Bang predicts. Come get the incredible scoop!
"Over the past few years, we've finally been able to observe solar systems in these very early stages of formation, finding central stars and proto-stars shrouded by gas, dust, and protoplanetary disks with gaps in them. These are the seeds of what will become giant and rocky planets, leading to full-on solar systems like our own. Although most of the stars that form — including, very likely our own — will have formed amidst thousands of others in massive star clusters, there are a few outliers that form in relative isolation.
It took a whopping 9.2 billion years of cosmic evolution for the Universe to give rise to the very beginning of our Solar System; our Sun and planets didn't form until 2/3rds of the time since the Big Bang had passed. In order to get there, we needed to form the right ingredients for life, rocky planets, and the chemistry we need. But when it happened to us, we weren't alone. It likely happened exactly the same way for thousands of other stars at once, and continues to happen even up through the present day.
Are we alone in the Universe? The cosmic story that brought us to existence seems to be a story that's universal. Here's a key step in how we got here.