Did Scientists REALLY Just FIND the Center Of the Universe?

 

Every once in a while we all have that moment when we feel like we are the center of the universe and everything revolves around us but have you ever wondered where the actual center of the universe is and

 sorry but as we hinted earlier

 it's not you welcome the Science Reads and today let's find out where the universe has its midpoint when we look up at the sky at night we can see a vast space full of stars that are not even one percent of the entire universe and yet the site is so beautiful and poised that one cannot help but imagine as we are looking up the cosmos are they looking back at us as if we are right in the middle of everything but are we obviously not we are not even in the center of our galaxy or even of our star system so where would the exact center of the universe be the simple answer to that simple question would be that the universe should not have a center why well because the universe is everywhere and if it's everywhere how can you find a point equally distance from its boundaries when the universe has no boundaries one may argue that what about the origin point of the universe people often misunderstand that the big bang was an explosion that burst outward from a central point of detonation and now the universe is expanding further and further away from it yeah also this visual representation of the expansion of the universe doesn't help much to dissuade that common myth either what actually happened during the big bang was that the universe started out extremely compact and tiny then every point in the universe not one single point mind you expanded equally and that expansion is still going on to this date so by that argument if there was no point of origin you cannot have a point that can be classified as the center of the universe confusing let's try to understand this at a relatively smaller scale imagine you are inflating a balloon that has a two-dimensional ant living on its surface the balloon inflates to a perfect spherical shape and now what this ant would perceive is a vast surface that looks the same everywhere no matter wherever that ant travels on the balloon the surface available on its left right forward and back wouldn't change its perception wouldn't change much so it cannot denote any point as the center of the balloon because all points are pretty much exactly the same there is no center on the sphere surface because there is no edge if you keep on inflating the balloon the ant will notice its two-dimensional universe expand for example if there was another ant on the surface of the balloon as the balloon will expand so will the distance between the two ants they both will notice that but again without edges there will be no center the only difference between the 2d ants universe and our universe is the third dimension and unlike ours the balloon universe is finite we can go up and down the ant cannot the surface of a spherical balloon is also limited while the only limits we have assumed till now in our universe is how far light has traveled since the big bang what we call the observable universe but there is no reason to believe that the universe ends at the edge of our observability one way to understand that at a smaller scale in the little demonstration we proposed earlier is by replacing the spherical balloon

 with an ever expanding flat rubber sheet if that doesn't help to comprehend the state of our universe you can imagine an infinite loaf of raisin bread that's continuously expanding the raisins in this case represent the galaxies flying away from one another but again unlike real bread there will be no edges there will be no end oh wait sorry got distracted by the

 thought of an endless delicious bread

 another reason why we use the rubber sheet and balloon to represent the universe in our demonstration is that we can assume the same about the surface of the universe

 depending on the gross amount of mass and energy in the cosmos the universe could be flat or curved if the mass and energy density of the universe or in other terms critical density is just right the universe would be flat like a sheet expanding at a steadily accelerating rate but if the density is higher then the cosmos would be curved like a balloon the extra gravity from this increased density would slow cosmic expansion eventually bringing that growth to a halt interestingly if the critical density was lower than just right the cosmic expansion would accelerate even more in this scenario the universe would have negative curvature with a shape somewhat like a saddle so let's look back at all the observations and evidence we humans have found so far about our ever surprising universe such as cosmic microwave background radiation and the afterglow from the big bang both of them and other minor observations remarkably point out that the critical density of our universe is just right and thus our universe is flat contrastingly unlike our earth also the after glow from the big bang

 sounds about right right but back to

 the flatness of our universe there's still one problem cosmologists still aren't sure if the universe is indeed flat or if the curvature is so wide that the universe only appears flat quite similar to how the earth feels flat for us on the surface given our perception is so small to experience it without looking very closely towards the horizon you can blame those cosmologists though they don't want to declare our universe to be flat too soon and be ridiculed by their extraterrestrial peers at galactic council for cosmology for being a flat universe cult this debate is crucial for finding a center for the universe because if critical density is not balanced then we can define the point with the highest or lowest mass as the center of the universe in the case of a balanced critical density there will be no such point because the mass is distributed equally in all directions and this scenario gets more complicated in the case of the concerned object being infinite that most likely our universe is if an object is infinite and uniform you simply cannot define a center of mass because all points are identical on the other hand if an object is infinite but not uniform you can define the center of mass of the entire object as the center of mass of the non-uniformity for instance it has a single knot of high density at one point for example look at the clouds in the sky certain kinds of clouds don't have a well-defined boundary but instead just stretch out in all directions getting thinner and thinner even though the cloud stretches out effectively to infinity the high density region of the cloud exists in a limited volume so you can find a center of mass through a limiting procedure observations currently indicate that the universe is infinite in size although planets and stars do represent non-uniformities in the space-time structure on the universal scale such uniformities are randomly dispersed in totality that brings back the average density of the universe to a uniform value being infinite and uniform there is no way to define a center of mass for the universe bummer likewise if our universe had curvature we could define the point of highest or lowest indent as the center of the universe like a salad ball there could be a central point to the universe from which all other points curve away but as we already discussed we haven't found any evidence supporting the existence of a curve in the universe yet we are not a flat universe cult mind you extraterrestrial scientists just lacking evidence to believe the contrary everything that we know that exists in our universe is either rotating on its own axis and also likely revolving around an

 object in the center of an umbrella object moon earth sun sagittarius a and the milky way all are rotating on their axis so one can assume that the universe may have an axis too like a wheel rotates around its axle if the universe has an axis it will rotate around a central point but it's safe to say that for whatsoever reason the universe doesn't appear to have an overall spin or rotation to it it all goes back to our universe being most likely flat and looking the same in all directions as in being isotropic another study found a 95 chance

 that the universe is homogeneous

 meaning it is the same everywhere on large scales so flatness equals no rotation which very well again is the outcome of lacking a central point another possibility is the center of the charge similar to the center of mass this would be a point in an object where the amount of electric charge is on average the same in all directions surrounding it the center of charge for a uniformly charged sphere would just be the center of the sphere

 and again similar to the mass distribution the charge distribution of the universe is infinite and uniform on average so that there is no center of the charge so it seems our universe very much is a centerless infinite blob that is expanding similarly in all outward and inward directions or we are just not advanced enough to find that center maybe the question of where is the center of the universe will go down in the archives as one of those unsolvable mysteries but whatever the answer is we can say one thing for sure you or somebody that you know is not the center of the universe so why don't you be a little humble like the article share it with that arrogant friend of yours to help them step down from their high horse and tell us in the comments what other mysteries of the universe shall we cover in our next article as always thanks for reading Science Reads