Monday, 11 February 2019

cosmology - What is our location relative to the Big Bang?


Given what we know about space, time and the movement of galaxies, have we or can we determine what our position is in relation to the projected location of the Big Bang? I've read some introductory papers on the superstructure and galaxy cluster movements, but none of them specifically mentioned space in terms of relative or absolute positions relating to the original position of the Big Bang.


So my question is, does our current understanding of the structure and workings of the Universe give us a good enough estimate to determine our location relative to the Big Bang or can we never guess at it, since every viewpoint in our universe looks the same in every direction?



Answer



Current cosmological theorists suppose that the universe is exactly identical, no matter where it is viewed from, so long as it is viewed at the same time. At the time of the big bang, the distances between any two given points seems to shrink to zero (or some nonzero value that we supposedly will derive from quantum mechanics). The conclusion is that the Big Bang happened everywhere, all at once.


This is also how you get out of the 'was the big bang a black hole?'-type questions: even though you had large concentrations of matter at times close to the big bang, they were spread out over all space, which is different than just having a clump of matter with finite extent (the second thing would collapse to a black hole).


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