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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Could Dark Energy and Gravity be the same thing?
« on: 17/10/2010 07:14:55 »
It is believed that space itself is expanding / being created. Kind of like tectonic plates that are moving apart, if I can use that as an analogy. The land mass sitting on those plates are being carried along with the plate with more crust being creating at the point the plates are separating. Similarly space is being created everywhere pushing everything apart (ignoring gravitational bound objects). The amount of additional space being created between 2 points over a given interval of time is proportional to the amount of space there is between those 2 points. So if there was a 100 units of space between 2 points and new space was being added at 10% for a given time interval then over that interval of time the 2 points would be 10 additional units apart. If they were initially 1000 units apart they would now be 100 units further apart over the same interval of time and if they were 10,000 then 1000 units further apart and so on. The theorized reason for the acceleration is that as time passes more space is being created which then positively feeds back on itself allowing even more space to be created. The redshift is the stretching/addition of space through which the photons are traveling. Write the word "photon" on an elastic band & stretch it, that's the redshift.