An incredible video about the center of the universe!

[SheilaT]

31. Thanks for posting that.

I have a son who is a budding astrophysicist, and he's currently doing research, meaning a lot of data crunching, about galaxies. Something about red spheroidal and blue elliptical galaxies, I can never keep it straight. I am constantly having him explain all this stuff to me, and he's remarkably patient no matter how often I ask the same questions.

Right now he's finishing up his undergraduate degree in Physics and is applying to PhD programs.

And yes, the Universe has no actual center because of the way the expansion worked, and yes, the background radiation from the Big Bang is everywhere, which is essentially why we know there is no actual center.

I'm not sure what's happening on a much larger scale, but according to my son, not only are Milky Way and Andromeda on a course to collide in about 4 billion years or so, the two galaxies will eventually merge into one large galaxy, and over time, all of the galaxies in our local cluster will merge into one very large galaxy. He also tells me that many billions of years from now, as the Universe continues expanding, it will get so large that light from distant parts will never reach us, and we (or whatever sort of intelligent life might be around in that vastly distant future) will have no way of knowing the size of the Universe, or that there are other galaxies out there. Even the background radiation from the Big Bang will no longer be detectable (although I don't know how far in the future that will be), so future astronomers will have no way of knowing how they got here.

Totally cool stuff.