Center Of The Universe
The center of my private universe right now is my girlfriend, and she needed my help today; we wrote a long letter to anyone concerned about her and many of her colleagues losing their jobs in two months.
source: NASA - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
But it's not my universe we're talking about here, it's everything else that has a center. And that's literally everything else; everything that exists has a center. Everything with mass has a center. Everything under the influence of gravity has a center. Every first person perspective on the universe has a center, namely the owner of the perspective. But can the same be said about the universe itself?
For the longest time we humans believed that we were the center of the universe; this is to be expected if we go by what we can observe from our perspective. Everything, the sun, moon and stars revolves around us like clockwork. Through history and increasing scientific evidence, we've drifted ever further from that center; we moved from the "geocentric" world-view with the earth in the center, to the "heliocentric" universe in which everything revolves around our sun. And now? Now we're in the center of nothing at all; we live in one fo many hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing several hundred billions of suns. And in our spiral galaxy, our sun resides in one of the spiral arms, roughly two thirds removed from the center. To say our place in the universe is mundane, is to severely overstate the significance of the location of our "pale blue dot".
Then who or what does reside at the center of All There Is? The answer might surprise you; no one and nothing does, as the universe has no center. At least none that we know of, none that we can know of. I'm the center of my universe, and because I'm on earth, the earth as at the center of the universe; this is true if we change "universe" to "observable universe". The universe that we can see, the amount of it, is determined by the speed of light; looking at distant stars is actually looking into the past in some sense. The nearest star other than our own sun, Alpha Centauri, is approximately 4 light years away; its light has taken 4 years to reach our eyes, so we see the star as it was 4 years ago.
Image by Felix Mittermeier - source: PxHere
So, from our viewpoint we are at the center of the observable universe. But that would not change if we viewed the universe from Alpha Centauri or from places much further away; every point from which we observe the universe will be the center. And the size of the observable universe won't change either; since the Big Bang light has had almost 14 billion years to travel, so no matter where we go, that's how far we can possibly see. The problem is however, that the universe itself is expanding at a rate much higher than the speed of light; it expands far past where we are currently able to see. And we're able to look back in time 46 billion years in all directions from our point of view, thanks to the speed of light and the expansion of the universe combined. There's good reasons to believe the universe stretches well beyond what's observable, and it may even be infinite giving us one more reason why the universe simply has no center.
But what if we just rolled back the clock, look where the universe is expanding from, couldn't we than calculate where the center is? I mean, the Big Bang happened somewhere, didn't it? Actually no. People imagine the Big Bang taking place "somewhere", when there was no "somewhere"; it is space-time itself that expands and therefore we can't point at a center inside it.
If you want to know more about the insignificance of our place in space-time, I gladly refer you to this excellent article on Medium by Ethan Siegel, especially if you're interested in the possibility of our universe being infinite or not. And don't let not being at the center of the universe let you down; we're still at the center of our own universes, and if nowhere is the center, all places are equally important.
What Lies at the Center of the Universe?
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