The Cosmos
Where is the universe from? Where is it going? How is it put together? How did it get to be this way.
These are Big questions. Very easy to ask but almost impossible to answer. We want answers for philosophical reason having nothing to do with science. No one will get rich from discovering the structure of the universe unless they right a book about it.
The area of science dealing with Big questions is called cosmology. The reason for it's study is found in the fact that:
The universe was born at a specific time in the past and has expanded ever since.
The Expansion of the Universe
Edwin Hubble established the existence of other galaxies. He noted that the light from these galaxies was shifted toward the red. That is it's wavelength was longer than that of the light emitted from the corresponding atoms in the lab.
WMAP image of the (extremely tiny) anisotropies in...
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, is an image of a smal...
English: Shows slices of expansion of universe wit...Furthermore he found that the farther away the galaxy was the more it was shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Hubble attributed this shift to the doppler effect.
Hubble saw this and concluded that all galaxies are rushing away from us and the universe is expanding as a whole. Modern equipment has observed and verified this so-called Hubble expansion exists throughout the observable universe.
This shows three important things. First there is no significance to the fact that earth seems to be the center of the universal expansion. In any galaxy it would look as if you were standing still and all others were rushing away from you. Second the movement of the universe is not like an explosion. Galaxies are not moved through the universe but expand with the universe. Third the galaxies themselves do not expand only the space between them.
Finally if you ask...