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Olbers’ Paradox
Olbers’ Paradox asks: if the Universe is infinite, and if there are stars (or galaxies) throughout it, why is the sky dark? Surely, if we look in any direction in the sky, that sightline will, eventually, land on a star. Common sense, therefore, tells us that everywhere we look, the sky should be as bright as the Sun, constantly aglow.
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The Age Of The Ever-Expanding Universe
The stranger physics comes in when you ask, what are those things whose light has travelled for that long? The Big Bang theory says that the Universe 13.8 billion years ago was a hot, dense inferno, in which all of space was filled with glowing-hot plasma, rippling and churning like the surface o...
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The Standard Resolution
The standard resolution to this paradox invokes the finite age of the cosmos and the speed of light. Even if the cosmos is endless and full of star...
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We Are Not The Center Of The Universe
While we may never know if the Universe as a whole is infinite or bounded, we know that the cosmic microwave background – the distant shell of fading fire that surrounds us – is the most distant light...
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Another Paradox Resolved
The reason the Universe can be glowing all around us but still look dark comes down to the physics of light in an expanding universe. When space expands, and the distance between objects grows, the light passing between those things gets stretched out, shifting the light to lower frequencies on t...
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The Universe: Infinite Or With A Boundary
Whether it’s more troubling to imagine that the Universe goes on forever in every direction, or that it has an edge, beyond which there is nothing, is hard to say.
Astrophysics doesn’t provide any guidance as to which flavour of existential crisis we should be having – while we can’t say wi...
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Related collections
Other curated ideas on this topic:
We have no idea what most of the universe looks like
About 96 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, which are undetectable to humans. Scientists believe this is because the particles that make up these substances don’t interact with regular matter or light. Even though scientific discoveries are constantly being made ab...
The Feeling of Awe
- Awe is a feeling of reverential respect, fear and wonder when we look at something vast, like the Grand Canyon, or a clear sky sprinkled with stars.
- When something makes us feel a tiny part of a massive universe around us, we bow down and are transformed.
- The feel...
Profound Love
Profound love involves kindness, generosity, and sympathetic joy for the beloved's success.
We will go through changes throughout our lives and if we see our partners as "above" or "beneath" us it will eventually become problematic because this places an unnecessary comparison in the relat...
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