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Dismantling the belief in a static universe, Edwin Hubble's revolutionary observations in the 1920s laid the groundwork for our understanding of a continually expanding cosmos. However, we must seek to reconcile this theory with observations that are consistent with a non-expanding universe, writes Tim Anderson. You have been taught that the universe began with a Big Bang, a hot, dense period about 13.8 billion years ago. And the reason we believe this to be true is because the universe is expanding and, therefore, was smaller in the past. The Cosmic Microwave Background is the smoking gun for the Big Bang,...

Next time you eat a blueberry (or chocolate chip) muffin consider what happened to the blueberries in the batter as it was baked. The blueberries started off all squished together, but as the muffin expanded they started to move away from each other. If you could sit on one blueberry you would see all the others moving away from you, but the same would be true for any blueberry you chose. In this sense galaxies are a lot like blueberries. Since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding. The strange fact is that there is no single place from...

Newsflash: the universe is expanding. We've known that since the pioneering and tireless work of Edwin Hubble about a century ago, and it's kind of a big deal. But before I talk about dark energy and why that's an even bigger deal, I need to clarify what we mean by the word "expanding." The actual observation that you can do in the comfort of your own home (provided you have access to a sufficiently large telescope and a spectrograph) is that galaxies appear to be receding from our own Milky Way. On average, of course: galaxies aren't simple creatures, and...

A 10-year study of 100,000 galaxies close to our own offers compelling proof that long-hypothesized "dark matter" does exist and is in fact a guiding force behind the structure of the universe, a team of Australian, British, and American astronomers revealed this week. Saying that "the universe we see is really quite structured," one of the lead researchers explained that the 10-year "census" of galaxies near our own Milky Way offers powerful evidence that this invisible dark matter "seems to hold the galaxies together." The dark matter's influence on galaxies "stops their constituent stars from flying off and it seems...