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Until the 1920's, scientists thought that the universe was in a "steady
state". The Steady State Universe Theory was based on three
assumptions, i.e. the universe was:
Infinite - it extends forever, but there was only one galaxy - The Milky
Way
If you look at the night sky, it seems easy to think that this is the way
the universe "has" always looked and "will" always look. However,
there was a problem pointed out by Heinrich Olbers in the 1800's - if
the universe were infinitely large and infinitely old, then the whole sky
should have a "glow". That is, at all points of sight there would
eventually be a star. If the universe was "infinitely old" then the light
from any star at any distance would have already reached us no
matter how far the distance. So all points in the heavens should have
some light.
However, the sky between stars was "very dark", with no signs of any
glow. This became known as Olbers' Paradox, but no one took the
"obvious" solution seriously. In retrospect, the solution was that "the
universe was expanding" and was not "infinitely old".
Hubble Telescope
In 1922, Alexander Friedmann, a Russian cosmologist and
mathematician, derived the Friedmann Equations from Albert Einstein's
equations of General Relativity. In 1924 Friedman published a paper
indicating that the universe must be either expanding or contracting,
but not static.
Hubble worked toward the end of his life to get the Nobel Prize
Committee to accept astronomy as an area of physics. He died in 1953
of a blood clot in his brain without succeeding. Shortly after his death,
the Nobel Prize Committee began to recognize astronomy as a valid
segment of physics, but the Committee does not award prizes to
people who have passed away. Top
While the early Big Bang Theory was based on Einstein's Theory of
General Relativity, almost universally accepted by scientists of the day,
there were some technical issues with the initial version of the Big
Bang Theory. The original Big Bang Theory did not contain "inflation"
and some scientists "rightly" poked holes in
the original theory. (See the Big Bang Theory page for a discussion of
these issues.) Most scientists thought that the Big Bang Theory was
correct in principle, but not complete. To confront the technical issues,
the solution was just to "assume" the proper conditions at the start of
the Big Bang process.
The solution to almost all of the Big Bang issues was to add an
extremely fast "exponential" expansion, called "inflation", into the first
micro-micro-seconds of the universe. Inflation caused the universe to
grow by a factor of 100 billion trillion trillion in just a few microseconds.
(Note that the universe was not expanding into empty space. Space-
time itself was growing faster than the speed of light. Space-time is not
limited by the speed of light, only objects "within" space-time are.)
Expansion Is Accelerating
Accelerating Expansion
In 1998 pictures from Hubble indicated that not only was the universe
expanding, but the expansion was accelerating. Astronomers from the
Supernova Cosmology Project (U. of California Berkeley Labs) and the
High-z Supernova Search Team (Australian National University and
John Hopkins University) were using "land-based" telescopes for
preliminary data and then the Hubble Space Telescope for fine detail.
After locating supernovas using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii
(designed by Berkeley) and other telescopes where time could be
scrounged, the teams used the the Hubble Telescope to study the
most distant supernovas as they required much more accurate
measurements than could be obtained from ground telescopes.
For a great description of the the universe, see the Video by NASA's Dr.
John Mather, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for the
confirmation of the CMB.