Panoramic
view of the entire near-infrared sky. The location of the Great
Attractor is shown following the long blue arrow at bottom-right.
Hubble Telescope image of the region of the sky where the Great Attractor is located
The Great Attractor is a gravitational anomaly in intergalactic space and the apparent central gravitational point of the Laniakea Supercluster. The observed anomalies suggest a localized concentration of mass thousands of times more massive than the Milky Way. However, it is inconveniently obscured by our own Milky Way's galactic plane, lying behind the so-called Zone of Avoidance (ZOA), so in visible wavelengths the Great Attractor is difficult to directly observe.
The anomaly is observable by its effect on the motion of galaxies
and their associated clusters, over a region hundreds of millions of light-years across. These galaxies are observable above and below the ZOA; all are redshifted in accordance with the Hubble Flow,
indicating that they are receding relative to us and to each other, but
the variations in their redshifts are large enough and regular enough
to reveal that they are slightly drawn towards the anomaly. The
variations in their redshifts are known as peculiar velocities,
and cover a range from about +700 km/s to −700 km/s, depending on the
angular deviation from the direction to the Great Attractor.
The Great Attractor itself is moving towards the Shapley Supercluster.[1] Recent astronomical studies by a team of South African astrophysicists revealed a supercluster of galaxies, termed the Vela Supercluster, in the Great Attractor's theorized location.[2]
Location
The
first indications of a deviation from uniform expansion of the universe
were reported in 1973 and again in 1978. The location of the Great
Attractor was finally determined in 1986: It is situated at a distance
of somewhere between 150 and 250 M ly (million light years) (47–79 M pc) (the larger being the most recent estimate) away from the Milky Way, in the direction of the constellations Triangulum Australe (The Southern Triangle) and Norma (The Carpenter’s Square). While objects in that direction lie in the Zone of Avoidance (the part of the night sky obscured by the Milky Way
galaxy) and are thus difficult to study with visible wavelengths, X-ray
observations have revealed that the region of space is dominated by the
Norma cluster (ACO 3627),
a massive cluster of galaxies containing a preponderance of large, old
galaxies, many of which are colliding with their neighbours and
radiating large amounts of radio waves.
Debate over apparent mass
In 1992, much of the apparent signal of the Great Attractor was attributed to a statistical effect called Malmquist bias. In 2005, astronomers conducting an X-ray survey of part of the sky known as the Clusters in the Zone of Avoidance
(CIZA) project reported that the Great Attractor was actually only one
tenth the mass that scientists had originally estimated. The survey also
confirmed earlier theories that the Milky Way galaxy is in fact being
pulled towards a much more massive cluster of galaxies near the Shapley Supercluster, which lies beyond the Great Attractor, and which is called the Shapley Attractor.
Dark flow
In astrophysics, Dark flow is a possible non-random component of the peculiar velocity of galaxy clusters. The measured velocity is the sum of that predicted by Hubble's Law added to a possible small, unexplained, "dark" velocity that flows in a direction common to the galaxy clusters.
Laniakea Supercluster
The proposed Laniakea Supercluster
is defined as the Great Attractor's basin, encompassing the former
superclusters of Virgo and Hydra-Centaurus. Thus the Great Attractor
would be the core of the new supercluster.
Vela Supercluster
In 2016, a multinational team of South African, European and Australian researchers headed by South African astronomer Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg
announced the discovery of a supercluster of galaxies that would
largely explain the mysterious Great Attractor. Using data from the AAOmega spectrograph, the 3.9 m Anglo-Australian Telescope, and the Southern African Large Telescope,
astronomers detected a region of galactic overdensity consistent with
the "supercluster" designation, which provides the requisite explanation
for a gravitational anomaly in the Shapley Supercluster neighborhood
where the Great Attractor was theorized to be located.
Visualization
of the whole observable universe. The scale is such that the fine
grains represent collections of large numbers of superclusters. The Virgo Supercluster—home of Milky Way—is marked at the center, but is too small to be seen.
The observable universe is a spherical region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time, because electromagnetic radiation from these objects has had time to reach the Solar System and Earth since the beginning of the cosmological expansion. There are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Assuming the universe is isotropic, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is roughly the same in every direction. That is, the observable universe has a spherical volume (a ball)
centered on the observer. Every location in the universe has its own
observable universe, which may or may not overlap with the one centered
on Earth.
The word observable in this sense does not refer to the capability of modern technology to detect light
or other information from an object, or whether there is anything to be
detected. It refers to the physical limit created by the speed of light itself. Because no signals can travel faster than light, any object farther away from us than light could travel in the age of the universe (estimated as of 2015 around 13.799±0.021 billion years) simply cannot be detected, as the signals could not have reached us yet. Sometimes astrophysicists distinguish between the visible universe, which includes only signals emitted since recombination (when hydrogen atoms were formed from protons and electrons and photons were emitted)—and the observable universe, which includes signals since the beginning of the cosmological expansion (the Big Bang in traditional physical cosmology, the end of the inflationary epoch in modern cosmology).
According to calculations, the current comoving distance—proper
distance, which takes into account that the universe has expanded since
the light was emitted—to particles from which the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) was emitted, which represents the radius of the visible universe, is about 14.0 billion parsecs
(about 45.7 billion light-years), while the comoving distance to the
edge of the observable universe is about 14.3 billion parsecs (about
46.6 billion light-years), about 2% larger. The radius of the observable universe is therefore estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years and its diameter about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, or 8.8×1026 metres or 2.89×1027 feet) which equals 880 yottameters. The total mass of ordinary matter in the universe can be calculated using the critical density and the diameter of the observable universe to be about 1.5 × 1053 kg. In November 2018, astronomers reported that the extragalactic background light (EBL) amounted to 4 × 1084 photons.
As the universe's expansion is accelerating, all currently
observable objects will eventually appear to freeze in time, while
emitting progressively redder and fainter light. For instance, objects
with the current redshift z from 5 to 10 will remain observable
for no more than 4–6 billion years. In addition, light emitted by
objects currently situated beyond a certain comoving distance (currently
about 19 billion parsecs) will never reach Earth.
The universe versus the observable universe
Some parts of the universe are too far away for the light emitted since the Big Bang
to have had enough time to reach Earth or its scientific space-based
instruments, and so lie outside the observable universe. In the future,
light from distant galaxies will have had more time to travel, so
additional regions will become observable. However, due to Hubble's law, regions sufficiently distant from the Earth are expanding away from it faster than the speed of light (special relativity
prevents nearby objects in the same local region from moving faster
than the speed of light with respect to each other, but there is no such
constraint for distant objects when the space between them is
expanding; see uses of the proper distance for a discussion) and furthermore the expansion rate appears to be accelerating due to dark energy.
Assuming dark energy remains constant (an unchanging cosmological constant),
so that the expansion rate of the universe continues to accelerate,
there is a "future visibility limit" beyond which objects will never
enter our observable universe at any time in the infinite future,
because light emitted by objects outside that limit would never reach
the Earth. (A subtlety is that, because the Hubble parameter
is decreasing with time, there can be cases where a galaxy that is
receding from the Earth just a bit faster than light does emit a signal
that reaches the Earth eventually.) This future visibility limit is calculated at a comoving distance
of 19 billion parsecs (62 billion light-years), assuming the universe
will keep expanding forever, which implies the number of galaxies that
we can ever theoretically observe in the infinite future (leaving aside
the issue that some may be impossible to observe in practice due to
redshift, as discussed in the following paragraph) is only larger than
the number currently observable by a factor of 2.36.
Though in principle more galaxies will become observable in the
future, in practice an increasing number of galaxies will become
extremely redshifted due to ongoing expansion, so much so that they will seem to disappear from view and become invisible.
An additional subtlety is that a galaxy at a given comoving distance is
defined to lie within the "observable universe" if we can receive
signals emitted by the galaxy at any age in its past history (say, a
signal sent from the galaxy only 500 million years after the Big Bang),
but because of the universe's expansion, there may be some later age at
which a signal sent from the same galaxy can never reach the Earth at
any point in the infinite future (so, for example, we might never see
what the galaxy looked like 10 billion years after the Big Bang),
even though it remains at the same comoving distance (comoving distance
is defined to be constant with time—unlike proper distance, which is
used to define recession velocity due to the expansion of space), which
is less than the comoving radius of the observable universe. This fact can be used to define a type of cosmic event horizon
whose distance from the Earth changes over time. For example, the
current distance to this horizon is about 16 billion light-years,
meaning that a signal from an event happening at present can eventually
reach the Earth in the future if the event is less than 16 billion
light-years away, but the signal will never reach the Earth if the event
is more than 16 billion light-years away.
Both popular and professional research articles in cosmology often use the term "universe" to mean "observable universe".
This can be justified on the grounds that we can never know anything by
direct experimentation about any part of the universe that is causally disconnected from the Earth, although many credible theories require a total universe much larger than the observable universe.
No evidence exists to suggest that the boundary of the observable
universe constitutes a boundary on the universe as a whole, nor do any
of the mainstream cosmological models propose that the universe has any
physical boundary in the first place, though some models propose it
could be finite but unbounded, like a higher-dimensional analogue of the
2D surface of a sphere that is finite in area but has no edge.
It is plausible that the galaxies within our observable universe represent only a minuscule fraction of the galaxies in the universe. According to the theory of cosmic inflation initially introduced by its founder, Alan Guth (and by D. Kazanas), if it is assumed that inflation began about 10−37
seconds after the Big Bang, then with the plausible assumption that the
size of the universe before the inflation occurred was approximately
equal to the speed of light times its age, that would suggest that at
present the entire universe's size is at least 3x1023 (109543 light-years) times the radius of the observable universe.
There are also lower estimates claiming that the entire universe is in
excess of 250 times larger (3,450 billion light-years) (by volume, not
by radius) than the observable universe and also higher estimates implying that the universe could have a diameter of at least 101010122 Mpc.
If the universe is finite but unbounded, it is also possible that the universe is smaller
than the observable universe. In this case, what we take to be very
distant galaxies may actually be duplicate images of nearby galaxies,
formed by light that has circumnavigated the universe. It is difficult
to test this hypothesis experimentally because different images of a
galaxy would show different eras in its history, and consequently might
appear quite different. Bielewicz et al.
claim to establish a lower bound of 27.9 gigaparsecs (91 billion
light-years) on the diameter of the last scattering surface (since this
is only a lower bound, the paper leaves open the possibility that the
whole universe is much larger, even infinite). This value is based on
matching-circle analysis of the WMAP 7 year data. This approach has been disputed.
Size
Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image of a region of the observable universe (equivalent sky area size shown in bottom left corner), near the constellation Fornax. Each spot is a galaxy, consisting of billions of stars. The light from the smallest, most redshifted galaxies originated nearly 14 billion years ago.
The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 14.26 gigaparsecs (46.5 billionlight-years or 4.40×1026 meters) in any direction. The observable universe is thus a sphere with a diameter of about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years or 8.8×1026 meters). Assuming that space is roughly flat (in the sense of being a Euclidean space), this size corresponds to a comoving volume of about 1.22×104 Gpc3 (4.22×105 Gly3 or 3.57×1080 m3).
The figures quoted above are distances now (in cosmological time),
not distances at the time the light was emitted. For example, the
cosmic microwave background radiation that we see right now was emitted
at the time of photon decoupling, estimated to have occurred about 380,000 years after the Big Bang,
which occurred around 13.8 billion years ago. This radiation was
emitted by matter that has, in the intervening time, mostly condensed
into galaxies, and those galaxies are now calculated to be about 46
billion light-years from us. To estimate the distance to that matter at the time the light was emitted, we may first note that according to the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric, which is used to model the expanding universe, if at the present time we receive light with a redshift of z, then the scale factor at the time the light was originally emitted is given by
.
WMAP nine-year results combined with other measurements give the redshift of photon decoupling as z = 1091.64±0.47, which implies that the scale factor at the time of photon decoupling would be 1⁄1092.64. So if the matter that originally emitted the oldest cosmic microwave background (CMBR) photons
has a present distance of 46 billion light-years, then at the time of
decoupling when the photons were originally emitted, the distance would
have been only about 42 million light-years.
Misconceptions about its size
An
example of the misconception that the radius of the observable universe
is 13 billion light-years. This plaque appears at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City.
Many secondary sources have reported a wide variety of incorrect
figures for the size of the visible universe. Some of these figures are
listed below, with brief descriptions of possible reasons for
misconceptions about them.
13.8 billion light-years
The age of the universe
is estimated to be 13.8 billion years. While it is commonly understood
that nothing can accelerate to velocities equal to or greater than that
of light, it is a common misconception that the radius of the observable
universe must therefore amount to only 13.8 billion light-years. This
reasoning would only make sense if the flat, static Minkowski spacetime conception under special relativity were correct. In the real universe, spacetime is curved in a way that corresponds to the expansion of space, as evidenced by Hubble's law. Distances obtained as the speed of light multiplied by a cosmological time interval have no direct physical significance.
15.8 billion light-years
This is obtained in the same way as the 13.8-billion-light-year
figure, but starting from an incorrect age of the universe that the
popular press reported in mid-2006.
78 billion light-years
In 2003, Cornish et al.
found this lower bound for the diameter of the whole universe (not just
the observable part), postulating that the universe is finite in size
due to it having a nontrivial topology, with this lower bound based on the estimated current distance between points that we can see on opposite sides of the cosmic microwave background
radiation (CMBR). If the whole universe is smaller than this sphere,
then light has had time to circumnavigate it since the Big Bang,
producing multiple images of distant points in the CMBR, which would
show up as patterns of repeating circles. Cornish et al. looked for such an effect at scales of up to 24 gigaparsecs (78 Gly or 7.4×1026 m)
and failed to find it, and suggested that if they could extend their
search to all possible orientations, they would then "be able to exclude
the possibility that we live in a universe smaller than 24 Gpc in
diameter". The authors also estimated that with "lower noise and higher
resolution CMB maps (from WMAP's extended mission and from Planck), we will be able to search for smaller circles and extend the limit to ~28 Gpc."
This estimate of the maximum lower bound that can be established by
future observations corresponds to a radius of 14 gigaparsecs, or around
46 billion light-years, about the same as the figure for the radius of
the visible universe (whose radius is defined by the CMBR sphere) given
in the opening section. A 2012 preprint by most of the same authors as
the Cornish et al. paper has extended the current lower bound to a
diameter of 98.5% the diameter of the CMBR sphere, or about 26 Gpc.
156 billion light-years
This figure was obtained by doubling 78 billion light-years on the assumption that it is a radius.
Because 78 billion light-years is already a diameter (the original
paper by Cornish et al. says, "By extending the search to all possible
orientations, we will be able to exclude the possibility that we live in
a universe smaller than 24 Gpc in diameter," and 24 Gpc is 78 billion
light-years), the doubled figure is incorrect. This figure was very widely reported. A press release from Montana State University–Bozeman, where Cornish works as an astrophysicist, noted the error when discussing a story that had appeared in Discover magazine, saying "Discover
mistakenly reported that the universe was 156 billion light-years wide,
thinking that 78 billion was the radius of the universe instead of its
diameter." As noted above, 78 billion was also incorrect.
180 billion light-years
This estimate combines the erroneous 156-billion-light-year figure with evidence that the M33 Galaxy
is actually fifteen percent farther away than previous estimates and
that, therefore, the Hubble constant is fifteen percent smaller. The 180-billion figure is obtained by adding 15% to 156 billion light-years.
Large-scale structure
Galaxy clusters, like RXC J0142.9+4438, are the nodes of the cosmic web that permeates the entire Universe.
Map of the Cosmic Web Generated from Slime Mould Algorithm
Sky surveys and mappings of the various wavelength bands of electromagnetic radiation (in particular 21-cm emission) have yielded much information on the content and character of the universe's structure. The organization of structure appears to follow as a hierarchical model with organization up to the scale of superclusters and filaments. Larger than this (at scales between 30 and 200 megaparsecs), there seems to be no continued structure, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the End of Greatness.
The organization of structure arguably begins at the stellar level, though most cosmologists rarely address astrophysics on that scale. Stars are organized into galaxies, which in turn form galaxy groups, galaxy clusters, superclusters, sheets, walls and filaments, which are separated by immense voids, creating a vast foam-like structure sometimes called the "cosmic web". Prior to 1989, it was commonly assumed that virialized
galaxy clusters were the largest structures in existence, and that they
were distributed more or less uniformly throughout the universe in
every direction. However, since the early 1980s, more and more
structures have been discovered. In 1983, Adrian Webster identified the
Webster LQG, a large quasar group
consisting of 5 quasars. The discovery was the first identification of a
large-scale structure, and has expanded the information about the known
grouping of matter in the universe.
In 1987, Robert Brent Tully identified the Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex,
the galaxy filament in which the Milky Way resides. It is about 1
billion light-years across. That same year, an unusually large region
with a much lower than average distribution of galaxies was discovered,
the Giant Void, which measures 1.3 billion light-years across. Based on redshift survey data, in 1989 Margaret Geller and John Huchra discovered the "Great Wall", a sheet of galaxies more than 500 million light-years
long and 200 million light-years wide, but only 15 million light-years
thick. The existence of this structure escaped notice for so long
because it requires locating the position of galaxies in three
dimensions, which involves combining location information about the
galaxies with distance information from redshifts.
Two years later, astronomers Roger G. Clowes and Luis E. Campusano discovered the Clowes–Campusano LQG, a large quasar group
measuring two billion light-years at its widest point which was the
largest known structure in the universe at the time of its announcement.
In April 2003, another large-scale structure was discovered, the Sloan Great Wall. In August 2007, a possible supervoid was detected in the constellation Eridanus. It coincides with the 'CMB cold spot',
a cold region in the microwave sky that is highly improbable under the
currently favored cosmological model. This supervoid could cause the
cold spot, but to do so it would have to be improbably big, possibly a
billion light-years across, almost as big as the Giant Void mentioned
above.
Computer
simulated image of an area of space more than 50 million light-years
across, presenting a possible large-scale distribution of light sources
in the universe—precise relative contributions of galaxies and quasars are unclear.
Another large-scale structure is the SSA22 Protocluster, a collection of galaxies and enormous gas bubbles that measures about 200 million light-years across.
In 2011, a large quasar group was discovered, U1.11, measuring about 2.5 billion light-years across. On January 11, 2013, another large quasar group, the Huge-LQG,
was discovered, which was measured to be four billion light-years
across, the largest known structure in the universe at that time. In November 2013, astronomers discovered the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall, an even bigger structure twice as large as the former. It was defined by the mapping of gamma-ray bursts.
End of Greatness
The End of Greatness is an observational scale discovered at roughly 100 Mpc (roughly 300 million light-years) where the lumpiness seen in the large-scale structure of the universe is homogenized and isotropized in accordance with the Cosmological Principle. At this scale, no pseudo-random fractalness is apparent.
The superclusters and filaments seen in smaller surveys are randomized to the extent that the smooth distribution of the universe is visually apparent. It was not until the redshift surveys of the 1990s were completed that this scale could accurately be observed.
Observations
"Panoramic view of the entire near-infrared sky reveals the distribution of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The image is derived from the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC)—more
than 1.5 million galaxies, and the Point Source Catalog (PSC)—nearly
0.5 billion Milky Way stars. The galaxies are color-coded by 'redshift' obtained from the UGC, CfA, Tully NBGC, LCRS, 2dF, 6dFGS, and SDSS surveys (and from various observations compiled by the NASA Extragalactic Database), or photo-metrically deduced from the K band (2.2 μm). Blue are the nearest sources (z < 0.01); green are at moderate distances (0.01 < z < 0.04) and red are the most distant sources that 2MASS resolves (0.04 < z < 0.1). The map is projected with an equal area Aitoff in the Galactic system (Milky Way at center)."
Another indicator of large-scale structure is the 'Lyman-alpha forest'. This is a collection of absorption lines that appear in the spectra of light from quasars, which are interpreted as indicating the existence of huge thin sheets of intergalactic (mostly hydrogen) gas. These sheets appear to be associated with the formation of new galaxies.
Caution is required in describing structures on a cosmic scale because things are often different from how they appear. Gravitational lensing
(bending of light by gravitation) can make an image appear to originate
in a different direction from its real source. This is caused when
foreground objects (such as galaxies) curve surrounding spacetime (as
predicted by general relativity),
and deflect passing light rays. Rather usefully, strong gravitational
lensing can sometimes magnify distant galaxies, making them easier to
detect. Weak lensing (gravitational shear) by the intervening universe in general also subtly changes the observed large-scale structure.
The large-scale structure of the universe also looks different if one only uses redshift
to measure distances to galaxies. For example, galaxies behind a galaxy
cluster are attracted to it, and so fall towards it, and so are
slightly blueshifted (compared to how they would be if there were no
cluster) On the near side, things are slightly redshifted. Thus, the
environment of the cluster looks somewhat squashed if using redshifts to
measure distance. An opposite effect works on the galaxies already
within a cluster: the galaxies have some random motion around the
cluster center, and when these random motions are converted to
redshifts, the cluster appears elongated. This creates a "finger of God"—the illusion of a long chain of galaxies pointed at the Earth.
Cosmography of Earth's cosmic neighborhood
At the centre of the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster, a gravitational anomaly called the Great Attractor affects the motion of galaxies over a region hundreds of millions of light-years across. These galaxies are all redshifted, in accordance with Hubble's law.
This indicates that they are receding from us and from each other, but
the variations in their redshift are sufficient to reveal the existence
of a concentration of mass equivalent to tens of thousands of galaxies.
The Great Attractor, discovered in 1986, lies at a distance of
between 150 million and 250 million light-years (250 million is the most
recent estimate), in the direction of the Hydra and Centaurusconstellations.
In its vicinity there is a preponderance of large old galaxies, many of
which are colliding with their neighbours, or radiating large amounts
of radio waves.
The mass of the observable universe is often quoted as 1050 tonnes or 1053 kg. In this context, mass refers to ordinary matter and includes the interstellar medium (ISM) and the intergalactic medium (IGM). However, it excludes dark matter and dark energy.
This quoted value for the mass of ordinary matter in the universe can
be estimated based on critical density. The calculations are for the
observable universe only as the volume of the whole is unknown and may
be infinite.
Estimates based on critical density
Critical density is the energy density for which the universe is flat. If there is no dark energy, it is also the density for which the expansion of the universe is poised between continued expansion and collapse. From the Friedmann equations, the value for critical density, is:
where G is the gravitational constant and H = H0 is the present value of the Hubble constant. The value for H0, due to the European Space Agency's Planck Telescope, is H0 = 67.15 kilometers per second per megaparsec. This gives a critical density of 0.85×10−26 kg/m3
(commonly quoted as about 5 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter). This
density includes four significant types of energy/mass: ordinary matter
(4.8%), neutrinos (0.1%), cold dark matter (26.8%), and dark energy (68.3%). Although neutrinos are Standard Model particles, they are listed separately because they are ultra-relativistic and hence behave
like radiation rather than like matter. The density of ordinary matter,
as measured by Planck, is 4.8% of the total critical density or 4.08×10−28 kg/m3.
To convert this density to mass we must multiply by volume, a value
based on the radius of the "observable universe". Since the universe has
been expanding for 13.8 billion years, the comoving distance (radius) is now about 46.6 billion light-years. Thus, volume (4/3πr3) equals 3.58×1080 m3 and the mass of ordinary matter equals density (4.08×10−28 kg/m3) times volume (3.58×1080 m3) or 1.46×1053 kg.
Matter content – number of atoms
Assuming the mass of ordinary matter is about 1.45×1053 kg as discussed above, and assuming all atoms are hydrogen atoms (which are about 74% of all atoms in our galaxy by mass),
the estimated total number of atoms in the observable universe is
obtained by dividing the mass of ordinary matter by the mass of a
hydrogen atom (1.45×1053 kg divided by 1.67×10−27 kg). The result is approximately 1080 hydrogen atoms, also known as the Eddington number.
Most distant objects
The most distant astronomical object yet announced as of 2016 is a galaxy classified GN-z11. In 2009, a gamma ray burst, GRB 090423, was found to have a redshift of 8.2, which indicates that the collapsing star that caused it exploded when the universe was only 630 million years old. The burst happened approximately 13 billion years ago,
so a distance of about 13 billion light-years was widely quoted in the
media (or sometimes a more precise figure of 13.035 billion
light-years), though this would be the "light travel distance" (see Distance measures (cosmology)) rather than the "proper distance" used in both Hubble's law and in defining the size of the observable universe (cosmologist Ned Wright argues against the common use of light travel distance in astronomical press releases on this page,
and at the bottom of the page offers online calculators that can be
used to calculate the current proper distance to a distant object in a
flat universe based on either the redshift z or the light travel time). The proper distance for a redshift of 8.2 would be about 9.2 Gpc, or about 30 billion light-years. Another record-holder for most distant object is a galaxy observed through and located beyond Abell 2218, also with a light travel distance of approximately 13 billion light-years from Earth, with observations from the Hubble telescope indicating a redshift between 6.6 and 7.1, and observations from Keck telescopes indicating a redshift towards the upper end of this range, around 7. The galaxy's light now observable on Earth would have begun to emanate from its source about 750 million years after the Big Bang.
Figure of the heavenly bodies — An illustration of the Ptolemaic geocentric system by Portuguese cosmographer and cartographer Bartolomeu Velho, 1568 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), depicting Earth as the centre of the Universe.
The center of the Universe is a concept that lacks a coherent definition in modern astronomy; according to standard cosmological theories on the shape of the universe, it has no center.
Historically, different people have suggested various locations
as the center of the Universe. Many mythological cosmologies included an
axis mundi,
the central axis of a flat Earth that connects the Earth, heavens, and
other realms together. In the 4th century BCE Greece, philosophers
developed the geocentric model,
based on astronomical observation; this model proposed that the center
of the Universe lies at the center of a spherical, stationary Earth,
around which the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars rotate. With the
development of the heliocentric model by Nicolaus Copernicus
in the 16th century, the Sun was believed to be the center of the
Universe, with the planets (including Earth) and stars orbiting it.
In religion or mythology, the axis mundi
(also cosmic axis, world axis, world pillar, columna cerului, center of
the world) is a point described as the center of the world, the
connection between it and Heaven, or both.
Mount Hermon in Lebanon was regarded in some cultures as the axis mundi.
A 1581 map depicting Jerusalem as the center of the world.
Sacred places constitute world centers (omphalos) with the altar
or place of prayer as the axis. Altars, incense sticks, candles and
torches form the axis by sending a column of smoke, and prayer, toward
heaven. The architecture of sacred places often reflects this role.
"Every temple or palace--and by extension, every sacred city or royal
residence--is a Sacred Mountain, thus becoming a Centre." The stupa of Hinduism, and later Buddhism, reflects Mount Meru. Cathedrals are laid out in the form of a cross,
with the vertical bar representing the union of Earth and heaven as the
horizontal bars represent union of people to one another, with the
altar at the intersection. Pagoda structures in Asian temples take the form of a stairway linking Earth and heaven. A steeple in a church or a minaret in a mosque also serve as connections of Earth and heaven. Structures such as the maypole, derived from the Saxons' Irminsul, and the totem pole among indigenous peoples of the Americas also represent world axes. The calumet, or sacred pipe, represents a column of smoke (the soul) rising form a world center. A mandala
creates a world center within the boundaries of its two-dimensional
space analogous to that created in three-dimensional space by a shrine.
In medieval times some Christians thought of Jerusalem as the center of the world (Latin: umbilicus mundi, Greek: Omphalos), and was so represented in the so-called T and O maps. Byzantine hymns speak of the Cross being "planted in the center of the earth."
Center of a flat Earth
The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveller who arrives at the edge of a Flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament.
The Flat Earth model is a belief that the Earth's shape is a plane or disk covered by a firmament containing heavenly bodies. Most pre-scientific cultures have had conceptions of a Flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD) and China until the 17th century. It was also typically held in the aboriginal cultures of the Americas, and a flat Earth domed by the firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl is common in pre-scientific societies.
"Center" is well-defined in a Flat Earth model. A flat Earth
would have a definite geographic center. There would also be a unique
point at the exact center of a spherical firmament (or a firmament that was a half-sphere).
Earth as the center of the Universe
The Flat Earth model gave way to an understanding of a Spherical Earth. Aristotle
(384–322 BCE) provided observational arguments supporting the idea of a
spherical Earth, namely that different stars are visible in different
locations, travelers going south see southern constellations rise higher
above the horizon, and the shadow of Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is round, and spheres cast circular shadows while discs generally do not.
This understanding was accompanied by models of the Universe that depicted the Sun, Moon, stars, and naked eye planets circling the spherical Earth, including the noteworthy models of Aristotle (see Aristotelian physics) and Ptolemy. This geocentric model was the dominant model from the 4th century BCE until the 17th century CE.
Sun as center of the Universe
The heliocentric model from Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
Heliocentrism, or heliocentricism, is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around a relatively stationary Sun at the center of our Solar System. The word comes from the Greek (ἥλιοςhelios "sun" and κέντρονkentron "center").
The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BCE by Aristarchus of Samos, but had received no support from most other ancient astronomers.
Nicolaus Copernicus' major theory of a heliocentric model was published in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres),
in 1543, the year of his death, though he had formulated the theory
several decades earlier. Copernicus' ideas were not immediately
accepted, but they did begin a paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic
geocentric model to a heliocentric model. The Copernican revolution, as this paradigm shift would come to be called, would last until Isaac Newton’s work over a century later.
Johannes Kepler published his first two laws about planetary motion in 1609, having found them by analyzing the astronomical observations of Tycho Brahe. Kepler's third law was published in 1619. The first law was "The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci."
On 7 January 1610 Galileo used his telescope, with optics superior to what had been available before. He described "three fixed stars, totally invisible by their smallness", all close to Jupiter, and lying on a straight line through it.
Observations on subsequent nights showed that the positions of these
"stars" relative to Jupiter were changing in a way that would have been
inexplicable if they had really been fixed stars. On 10 January Galileo
noted that one of them had disappeared, an observation which he
attributed to its being hidden behind Jupiter. Within a few days he
concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter: Galileo stated that he had reached this conclusion on 11 January. He had discovered three of Jupiter's four largest satellites (moons). He discovered the fourth on 13 January.
His observations of the satellites of Jupiter created a
revolution in astronomy: a planet with smaller planets orbiting it did
not conform to the principles of Aristotelian Cosmology, which held that all heavenly bodies should circle the Earth.
Many astronomers and philosophers initially refused to believe that
Galileo could have discovered such a thing; by showing that, like
Earth, other planets could also have moons of their own that followed
prescribed paths, and hence that orbital mechanics
didn't apply only to the Earth, planets, and Sun, what Galileo had
essentially done was to show that other planets might be "like Earth".
Newton made clear his heliocentric
view of the Solar System – developed in a somewhat modern way, because
already in the mid-1680s he recognised the "deviation of the Sun" from
the centre of gravity of the solar system.
For Newton, it was not precisely the centre of the Sun or any other
body that could be considered at rest, but rather "the common centre of
gravity of the Earth, the Sun and all the Planets is to be esteem'd the
Centre of the World", and this centre of gravity "either is at rest or
moves uniformly forward in a right line" (Newton adopted the "at rest"
alternative in view of common consent that the centre, wherever it was,
was at rest).
Milky Way's galactic center as center of the Universe
Before the 1920s, it was generally believed that there were no galaxies other than our own (see for example The Great Debate).
Thus, to astronomers of previous centuries, there was no distinction
between a hypothetical center of the galaxy and a hypothetical center of
the universe.
In 1750 Thomas Wright, in his work An original theory or new hypothesis of the Universe, correctly speculated that the Milky Way might be a body of a huge number of stars held together by gravitational forces rotating about a Galactic Center,
akin to the Solar System but on a much larger scale. The resulting disk
of stars can be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside
the disk. In a treatise in 1755, Immanuel Kant elaborated on Wright's idea about the structure of the Milky Way.
The 19th century astronomer Johann Heinrich von Mädler proposed the Central Sun Hypothesis, according to which the stars of the universe revolved around a point in the Pleiades.
The nonexistence of a center of the Universe
In 1917, Heber Doust Curtis observed a nova within what then was called the "Andromeda
Nebula". Searching the photographic record, 11 more novae were
discovered. Curtis noticed that novas in Andromeda were drastically
fainter than novas in the Milky Way. Based on this, Curtis was able to estimate that Andromeda was 500,000 light-years
away. As a result, Curtis became a proponent of the so-called "island
Universes" hypothesis, which held that objects previously believed to be
spiral nebulae within the Milky Way were actually independent galaxies.
In 1920, the Great Debate between Harlow Shapley
and Curtis took place, concerning the nature of the Milky Way, spiral
nebulae, and the dimensions of the Universe. To support his claim that
the Great Andromeda Nebula (M31) was an external galaxy, Curtis also
noted the appearance of dark lanes resembling the dust clouds in our own
galaxy, as well as the significant Doppler shift. In 1922 Ernst Öpik
presented an elegant and simple astrophysical method to estimate the
distance of M31. His result put the Andromeda Nebula far outside our
galaxy at a distance of about 450,000 parsec, which is about 1,500,000 ly. Edwin Hubble settled the debate about whether other galaxies exist in 1925 when he identified extragalactic Cepheid variable stars for the first time on astronomical photos of M31. These were made using the 2.5 metre (100 in) Hooker telescope,
and they enabled the distance of Great Andromeda Nebula to be
determined. His measurement demonstrated conclusively that this feature
was not a cluster of stars and gas within our galaxy, but an entirely
separate galaxy located a significant distance from our own. This proved
the existence of other galaxies.
Expanding Universe
Hubble also demonstrated that the redshift of other galaxies is approximately proportional to their distance from the Earth (Hubble's law).
This raised the appearance of our galaxy being in the center of an
expanding Universe, however, Hubble rejected the findings
philosophically:
...if we see the nebulae all
receding from our position in space, then every other observer, no
matter where he may be located, will see the nebulae all receding from
his position. However, the assumption is adopted. There must be no
favoured location in the Universe, no centre, no boundary; all must see
the Universe alike. And, in order to ensure this situation, the
cosmologist, postulates spatial isotropy and spatial homogeneity, which
is his way of stating that the Universe must be pretty much alike
everywhere and in all directions."
The redshift observations of Hubble, in which galaxies appear to be
moving away from us at a rate proportional to their distance from us,
are now understood to be a result of the metric expansion of space.
This is the increase of the distance between two distant parts of the
Universe with time, and is an intrinsic expansion whereby the scale of
space itself changes. As Hubble theorized, all observers anywhere in the
Universe will observe a similar effect.
Copernican and cosmological principles
The Copernican principle, named after Nicolaus Copernicus, states that the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position. Hermann Bondi
named the principle after Copernicus in the mid-20th century, although
the principle itself dates back to the 16th-17th century paradigm shift away from the geocentric Ptolemaic system.
The cosmological principle
is an extension of the Copernican principle which states that the
Universe is homogeneous (the same observational evidence is available to
observers at different locations in the Universe) and isotropic (the
same observational evidence is available by looking in any direction in
the Universe). A homogeneous, isotropic Universe does not have a center.
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