To understand the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, we first have to understand what redshifting is and to understand redshifting we have to understand some basic information about the wave-particle duality of light.
As most physics students know, light has wave and particle-like characteristics and hence has a wavelength and frequency. In simple terms, scientists measure the light from a 1a supernova. However, due to the universe expanding, the light redshifts and scientists can calculate the redshift to figure out the expansion of the universe.
The idea of redshift is based on the fact that if light is attempting to reach somewhere, but the place is moving away at an extremely fast pace. Then light's wavelength increases and hence the colour turns red (visible light spectrum)
Hence while observing light from distant stars, scientists observed that the light was undergoing 'red shifting' and found out that the red shifting was increasing at an accelerated rate and hence the only way for this to happen is if space and hence the universe were to be expanding.
Now that we've gone through the how, let's go through the why. Currently this expansion of the universe is considered to be there due to 'dark energy' which is well...... we don't know. What we do know however is that something is causing this expansion and we have hence coined this something as dark energy. The existence of dark energy and expansion of the universe have led to some scenarios of the future of the universe but I'll go through that in another blog post.
Signing out,
Mehul.
As most physics students know, light has wave and particle-like characteristics and hence has a wavelength and frequency. In simple terms, scientists measure the light from a 1a supernova. However, due to the universe expanding, the light redshifts and scientists can calculate the redshift to figure out the expansion of the universe.
The idea of redshift is based on the fact that if light is attempting to reach somewhere, but the place is moving away at an extremely fast pace. Then light's wavelength increases and hence the colour turns red (visible light spectrum)
Hence while observing light from distant stars, scientists observed that the light was undergoing 'red shifting' and found out that the red shifting was increasing at an accelerated rate and hence the only way for this to happen is if space and hence the universe were to be expanding.
Now that we've gone through the how, let's go through the why. Currently this expansion of the universe is considered to be there due to 'dark energy' which is well...... we don't know. What we do know however is that something is causing this expansion and we have hence coined this something as dark energy. The existence of dark energy and expansion of the universe have led to some scenarios of the future of the universe but I'll go through that in another blog post.
Signing out,
Mehul.
