Creation of the Universe

5 Facts About The Creation Of The Universe

On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe was created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science.  Check out these 5 surprising facts about the creation of the universe....

Kepler Was Wrong This colorful view of the universe was captured by the Hubble telescope. Seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler should have stuck with his theories about the motion of the planets, because it turns out that he was wrong about the age of the universe to the tune of billions of years. Astronomers now estimate the age of the universe at around 13.7 billion years, give or take a few million. The age was calculated by measuring the density of energy and matter in the universe, which determined how fast it expanded billions of years back into the past.

The Universe Is Flat The Milky Way is only a small part of the universe and is 100,000 to 150,000 light-years across. Flat Earth Society members may be a bit more cheered after finding out Earth isn’t flat but the universe is. According to the Theory of General Relativity by Einstein, the universe can only be closed, open or flat. Measurements taken in the 2001 NASA exploratory mission, called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), confirms that the universe is indeed flat.

What You See in the Night Sky Is From Long Ago Wishing upon a star might be a little retroactive, since the twinkling lights we see in the nighttime sky have taken so much time to get to us on Earth that they are really old. What viewers and astronomers see in the night sky is how stars looked in the distant past. For example, Orion’s star Betelgeuse is 640 light years' away, so the light that reaches us would have left Betelgeuse around the year 1370, during the period of the Hundred Years’ War.

The Universe Has No Center It can be difficult to locate the center of something when it keeps moving, and that’s the problem with finding the center of the universe. The galaxies inside the universe are moving away from each other, which is expanding the size of the universe, and they are apparently moving faster and faster as time passes. Some scientists believe it is dark energy that is driving the universe’s expansion, but only time — and a lot of it —will tell.

There Might Be More Than One Universe One controversial hypothesis has been that there are many universes. However, a new study suggests that our universe may have collided with some of them. This supposedly would have left telltale evidence in the light that spread out from the Big Bang by leaving a circular pattern. A study by Stephen Hawking and physicist Thomas Hertog that was modified a few days before Hawking died, suggests that there may be many other universes similar to ours out there in space.