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Do We Live In a Giant Cosmic Bubble?
Khemisty writes "Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.
Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario.
If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations.
'If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn't be accelerating,' said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. 'It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were.'"
If this was why the galaxies appear to rotate to quickly at the edges.
Would the greater density at the galactic cores cause time to go slower and effect the apparent speed as observed from the exterier of the system?
Except if such specialties make our sentient life possible (or much more probable).
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Density distribution throughout the universe (ours, at least) is relative to the scale at which your measurements are made. Follow me here...
If you get far enough away from this universe, and I'm talking 'Douglas Adams' far, this universe would appear to be perfectly uniform. However, the closer your observation point becomes, the easier it is to distinguish the clumps, bumps, peaks, valleys, troughs, etc. in the density. At a very close, human-type scale, the density changes are very easy to spot. How dense is the space between the Earth and the Moon as compared to the Earth itself?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
My favorite alternative is that we need someone to do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton; that just like Newton's laws are near-perfect and beautiful at reasonable speeds, maybe there's something that happens at cosmically grand distances, masses, or propagation delays for Gravity that we're going to have to be awfully clever to ever hope to reliably detect.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy both felt like big hacks to me.
But, I am by no means a scientist, just an interest layman who hasn't done enough reading.
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I like this theory. My questions are, if our known universe is a bubble/globule of matter floating in a larger void...
You're believing something the opposite of what the premise of the article is. The premise of the article is that we are in a bubble containing a void, not a highly dense space.
I think we really need to restructure our underlying philosophy of what existence is. I've been chewing on this concept for years:
This "universe" isn't infinite. It's a 4 dimensional object, with a large but quantifiable amount of mass/energy, and this mass/energy has permutations across x, y, z and t. You see a 3 dimensional object with dimensions x, y, z moving through t, but observed from outside the t dimension, it's a 4 dimensional object.
The big bang, the singularity, is significant because at the moment that the mass/energy of the universe is in the singular state, it is identical to all the other universes. It is at this point that it "connects" to all the other universes, like petals connecting together to make a flower.
Questions of religion, spirituality and what it means to be human start getting in your way once you start looking at things this way. Am I an aspect of this object that is my universe, or am I some sort of traveler within this object that is a universe?
I think there's a good possibility that the missing matter and forces we hypothesize to be acting upon our universe are actually other universes influencing our own, like petals on a flower bumping into each other. And, assuming that we are "souls traveling within the universe" as opposed to "4 dimensional objects that are aspects of the universe", it isn't outside the bounds of reason to imagine that we might one day be able to map the shape of these universes and achieve "time travel" by moving to other universes.
I expect that we will eventually find the concept of the "infinite universe" to be a false path, and that we will achieve great breakthroughs when we find a framework that doesn't rely upon its existence.
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Why does the first thing that comes to mind after reading just this headline, make me think of that one episode on Star Trek Voyager, when Voyager got caught in that planets atmosphere/space-time bubble and time on that planet was accelerating at like almost a week for every second on voyager... and then the civilization finally learned space travel and went up to voyager, and learned about all the time acceleration... Kinda screwed up if this is all true. :P
Just me
As mentioned in the article:
One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reined in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special. ... "This idea that we live in a void would really be a statement that we live in a special place,"
Hold on a second...
Current thinking is that 74 percent of the universe could be made up of this exotic dark energy, with another 21 percent being dark matter, and normal matter comprising the remaining 5 percent.
So, being part of the 5 percent of "normal" matter isn't living in a "special place"?
To make even more of an impact, though, try linking to a reputable source.
By linking to a Wikipedia article, I linked to all the reliable sources that the Wikipedia article cited. Do you complain that they are not reliable sources, or do you claim that the Wikipedia article misrepresents the sources?