What is the true center of the Universe? The answer will fuel new questions

The universe is constantly expanding, but what is its center? The answer leaves room for further curiosity.

Ever since humans have been able to question yourselfto become aware of himself and the world around him, lobservation of the stars has exercised an incredible fascination. The celestial vault was initially perceived as a different dimension from the earthly one, as the habitat of supernatural beings, with divine powers.

For centuries the observation and study of the stars have been at the center of production philosophical and theological, a topic of discussion and clash between scholars and religious people. That is until it wasn’t sets an exclusively theological vision of the celestial vault and of the universe that has positioned the earth for some time in the center of existence and the sun as a star at the service of humanity.

Galileo was responsible for the rediscovery of the centrality of the sun in our system, of the existence of other planets and possible other forms of life. A shift in focus that generated turmoil but has initiated a more in-depth study of what remains unknown to us, which is distant for us and the objective of exploration and discovery.

What is the center of the Universe

Today we are aware that our solar system is only one of many that make up the Milky Way and that our galaxy is only one of the many that make up the universe. He has a similar awareness significantly reduced the centrality of man in existenceheightened the sense of loneliness and that of impotence and profound ignorance compared to what the complete picture is.

Sensations that become even stronger when you consider that the Universe is not even given and finite. About a century ago, in factthe American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered and demonstrated that the universe is constantly expanding and potentially infinite. If there were still doubts that the earth is not the center of the universe, the discovery has definitively erased them. What everyone is wondering now is: what then is the center of the universe?

Our knowledge of earthly things leads us to think that to expand an object, a body or a liquid needs a place in which to do so. The classic example is that of a liquid contained inside a tray: once the capacity of the container is exceeded, the liquid overflows but inside it always remains the same quantity.

We are therefore led to think of the expanding Universe as something that occupies a pre-existing space, but things aren’t exactly like that. In fact, there is no place within which the Universe expands, it is space that expands simultaneously with it.

To clarify the concept, Professor Amedeo Balbi of the University of Tor Vergata in Rome gave the example of leavening of the panettone. We must imagine the galaxies as if they were raisins inside the dough; gradually the dough risesIn fact, raisins distance themselves and this is exactly what happens to planets, systems and galaxies within the Universe.

This concept seems detached but it ties perfectly to the answer of what the center of the Universe is. Expansion indeed it does not proceed from a fixed point towards one or more directions, this occurs simultaneously in all points of the Universe, therefore each celestial body gradually moves further and further away from all the others, which reveals to us that there is no real center.

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