Learn more about sciencefiction with this collection
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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 we can ever see, at the edge of our observable universe. But just like the darkness of the night sky, this edge is a matter of perspective. Someone living in a galaxy billions of light years away from us sits at the centre of their own observable universe, which may only partly overlap our own.
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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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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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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 sta...
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
The big questions of a scientific world
SF, the good SF at lest, is working on the same big questions we keep asking as human beings, but from a place of scientific understanding rather than assuming everything is God-made:
- What is our purpose in an infinite universe that does not seem to care about us?
- Are we alone ...
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 origin of Kamo’oalewa
And according to a new study in Nature, we may at last know how it was formed.
The moon’s been getting bombarded by space rocks for billions of years, resulting in all manner of lunar debris getting ejected into space (nearly ...
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