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The expansion of the universe after this week's news about DESI and dark energy (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by AllOutOfBubbleGum@lemmy.world to c/askscience@lemmy.world

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-dark-energy-rattling-view-universe.html

Hello, I'm not sure if this is the best place to post something like this, but here we go. The above link is of new findings from DESI (the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) that's been written about by a handful of news outlets this week, and the TL;DR is that the expansion of the universe might not be as consistent as previously thought.

My question is: Could it be possible for the overall universe to only look like it's expanding because the expansion is currently happening within our visible universe? And that in other portions of the universe, far outside of our visible universe, it might be stationary, or even contracting?

To put it another way, could it be possible that the universe as a whole is rippling or oscillating, maybe due to the effects of the big bang, and that our visible universe is such a tiny spec, that from our perspective it only appears that the entire universe is expanding?

I've watched a number of talks where astrophysicists have said that the big bang didn't start from a single point and expand outward like it's usually depicted, but that it happened everywhere all at once. So, from my limited understanding, it doesn't seem like that would contradict what we see from the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Am I way off base here? Or is this one of those questions that simply can't be currently answered?

Thanks in advance.

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[–] DemBoSain@midwest.social 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

All of those are possible. We don't even know how big the universe actually is, just that it's larger than we can see or measure. It might be larger than we can ever measure or even calculate. And our current knowledge is based on what we can see.

If the universe is infinite, all sorts of weird ideas come into play. We might not have to find another universe to find an identical version of earth, except everyone has cowboy hats. That earth is probably just very far away.

[–] Chocrates@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

I feel like PBS did a show on that. The universe could be so large that statistically there is another identical earth somewhere out there.