Expanding Universe

THE INFERENCE - ONE could not be quite sure whether it amounts to a discovery which would require irrefutable proof - drawn from the ``spying'' by the Hubble telescope of the most distant Supernova, the eleven-billion-year-old exploding star, that a ``repulsive'' dark energy is spurring the expansion of the universe throws up quite a few questions. Mr. Michael Turner of the University of Chicago has said that astronomers who had believed for seventy years that the universe would be slowing down have now found that the ``darn thing'' is actually speeding up. It seems that the assumption about the slowing down of the universe to which our attention is now being drawn, was actually a reversal of what had earlier been stated by Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), a close associate of Albert Einstein.

In his Expanding Universe, published in 1933, Eddington had stated with certainty that the universe was expanding at a gallop and many galaxies were fast disappearing from the view of the Milky Way planetary system to which the sun belongs and we would never know what was happening to them. Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946) and other astronomers of the time fully shared Eddington's belief. If, as it now appears, there were subseqeuently reasons to believe that the universe was slowing down and not expanding as Eddington had written, it looks very unlikely that this was widely known. The dizzy pace of advance of science and technology, however, seems to have confirmed Eddington's theory that the universe is actually expanding though one could never be sure that the astronomers who positioned themselves later to study the universe had really thought that he was wrong.

The possibility of the universe having slowed down from a cosmic explosion, resulting in the weakening of mutual gravitational pull later coming to light, could blaze a new trail for astronomers. The message from this celestial blow-up, which could make itself known to astronomers only a few billion years after it had taken place and tracked by the Hubble telescope, could be very unsettling. Hypotheses based on what is actually known at a point of time would have to be given up when startling new facts emerge as it now seems to have happened. The revelations about the mysterious ``dark energy'' give a further push to what is already known about the collapsing stars which sink into black holes in space from which even light cannot escape. The likeness suggested by dark energy and blackness would, however, appear to be nothing more than semantic. Unlike the stars drawn into an inescapable captivity in the cosmic black holes, the dark energy pushes things away from each other to make itself an anti- gravity presence.

This is a startling piece of news picked up by the Hubble telescope. The discoveries which space science has so far made do not seem to have revealed anything even remotely suggestive of such anti-gravity which has now come to light. Knowledge of anti- gravity has so far been limited to the absence of the gravitational pull in the void of space. If it could also push matter away as magnetic like-poles do, it is an illustration of the strange happenings in space. The striking fact about something sounding similar is anti-matter which is said to have been blown up in the same quantities as matter immediately after the Big Bang which had created the universe fifteen billion years ago. If this baffles imagination, the latest word is about the U.S. Stanford Accelerator Centre trying to capture anti-matter by colliding a hair-thin beam of electrons into an opposing stream of positrons. This could create an electronic counterpart of anti-matter and throw some light on the mystery of there being ``nothing at all'' - perhaps not even space - in the universe.

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