Why is Space Accelerating? One of the great mysteries about space is why is the expansion accelerating? At first it was believed it was an error with the Hubble telescope so it was sort of disregarded. When we launched the James Webb telescope, we decided to check this acceleration result with that telescope and to the astonishment of the scientists, we found out the results we had received from the James Webb telescope were the same as those from the Hubble. What did this mean? Well for one thing we know we are picking up speed and everything in space is moving at accelerating speed, but we don’t know why. What is the speed so far? I found it said right that galaxies are moving away from us at the rate of 67 to 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec. A megaparsec is said to be 3.26 million light years. 70 kilometers is roughly 43 miles. At 43 miles a second we get the speed of 154,800 miles per hour. Wow, galaxies are really moving away from us fast.It is important to note space is expanding out in all directions. The stranger part of this is the fact we have been unable to find the center of this expansion, so the accelerating of space is happening in all directions so when I talk about the edge of visible space that can be in any direction. We have found incredibly large super black holes at the center of other galaxies. As far as we know now, they are the biggest and most powerful objects in the universe, but could we be wrong in thinking these supermassive giants are as big as they get? Perhaps there is the mother of all black holes just past the rim of our universe which is swallowing everything that passes the rim. Maybe there is another universe pulling on us and the objects being pulled into it become part of this growing universe. For those of you who believe the universe is a computer simulation, the edge of the visual universe might just be the end of the program's bounds. By the way, I don’t believe we are in a computer simulation, but I do believe there are some things happening in the universe we just can’t explain. There could be another reason the galaxies are accelerating and it is sort of an old idea. For years it has been proposed there could be a rip or rips in our universe letting in matter from another universe. This additional space could be pushing on the current space and making it accelerate. This idea hinges on there being other universes and maybe other dimensions are entering our own and we don’t know it and they are exerting some sort of force which is speeding things up. One of the lesser ideas could be to track all the huge explosions in space to see if they have enough cumulative power to speed up space, but I don’t really think this could do it on such a universal scale. Then there is dark energy. The discovery of dark energy was recognized by awarding a 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for its discovery. Many scientists think dark energy is somehow responsible for the accelerating of space. Having said this, no one knows the nature of dark energy. There are theories however. Some say it creates a field known as Quintessence which is a negative energy field, while other believe it contains particles which pop in an out of space. None of this has been proved yet. To me it seems like scientists are saying there is some force we know nothing about moving space. It is almost an excuse for something we know nothing about which may or may not exist. The existence of dark energy is only based on the fact something may be moving space. Maybe it might turn out each galaxy has some force within it which is accelerating the speed of the space around it. We see all of them accelerating and think some outside force is pulling or pushing them while the truth is they are self-propelled. I think this idea may have a problem and it is the uniform acceleration of the galaxies. One would think if this is true the bigger galaxies might move faster than the smaller ones because they would have more of this force than the smaller ones. On the other hand, maybe there is a force which has the same power no matter what its size is and we just have not discovered it yet and it could change the laws of physics. Could it be there is a sort of drain which is at the end of the universe which is drawing us to it and flowing somewhere else? Maybe there is a tremendous vacuum at the edge of the universe and we are being sucked into it at increasing speeds. Maybe the absence of space as we know it is drawing us to the edge. One can almost picture the enormous whirlpool all around our universe which could be drawing galaxies into it where they may or may not be meeting their end. Perhaps these galaxies are being dumped back in on our universe somehow in a never-ending cycle of dumping and reappearing and starting their journey all over again until they reach the edge.
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