Is the Material of Space Expanding?

Sometimes bodies move further away for more than one reason. When the moon was first formed, many scientists believed it was about 15,534 miles from the earth and today it is 238,900.  The moon is continuing to move away from the earth. The moon’s movement away from the earth has varied over the years, and there is a belief in another 15 billion years or so it will stabilize. This may not be true if space located between the earth and moon expands, but will it? This is such a hard question to answer, because we only recently discovered space itself was expanding. It is possible we might not have the entire picture yet.

The expansion can be seen better when we look at very distant objects like galaxies. Sometimes galaxies crash into each other, but in general they are moving away from each other. Lay people have a hard time realizing this, because many of us know the Andromeda Galaxy is moving toward us and will crash into us sometime in the very distant future, so the question becomes how is this possible at a time when everything is supposed to be drifting away? Scientists think this happens, because some galaxies are attracted to each other in such a way it overrides the effect of the expansion of space, because it is more powerful, and some think dark matter and gravity are the source of this mystery. There is a formula for the speed space is moving away from us, and I have a confession to make, I really do not understand it. The rest of space is said to be moving away at about 250,000 miles per hour. Galaxies are rushing away from us at a rate, recently measured by today’s cosmologists, to be 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec (where one megaparsec equals around 3.26 million light years). The Andromeda galaxy is heading towards us at a speed of 250,000 miles per hour.

What I find fascinating about the movement of space is the fact it seems to match the way a fictional warp drive would work. Supposedly it would compact space in front of it and expand it behind. It does make one wonder if there would be any way we could take advantage of this natural expansion of space for space travel. My gut makes me think probably not, because it seems to me we would have to get ahead of the expansion speed by a lot to catch up with distant stars. We still have a lot to learn about this stuff.

One of the things we have to wonder about is whether black holes have anything to do with the expansion and what roles do dark energy and dark matter play in this scenario? Would there still be expansion if there were no dark holes, dark energy or dark matter? It would be nice to see dark matter to know absolutely it exists for sure, and the same is true for dark energy. There are quite a few scientists who are hanging their hats on the fact the LHC or Large Hadron Collider, the machine that smashes particles together at near light speed, will eventually come up with the answer. Every few years it seems we are increasing its power and now China is going to build an even bigger collider. What we have to hope is they don’t create anything which threatens the earth like a black hole which can’t be extinguished, and just keeps swallowing up more material and grows. Yes, this sounds like the plot for a few science fiction movies I have seen, but unfortunately it is something which might be able to happen if we are not careful. I remember one scientist say it was a tiny possibility but we had to take that chance to advance science. No we don’t. He was actually saying it was more important to perform the experiment then caring about what might happen to the Earth and population.
We thought for many years the universe was expanding, because of a single giant particle which exploded creating everything and that expansion just continued. To think it could be space which is expanding or a combination of both a blast and space expansion is a surprise. Originally it was felt the results of the blast which was thought to have created our universe would slow down and eventually all the bodies in space would start to travel back until they formed another super particle which exploded again creating another universe and so forth. This was believed until it was found instead of the expansion slowing down it was speeding up. Then the theory changed and it was thought there was some sort of attractive force beyond where we could see and it was pulling us toward it. This also seems to be wrong now.

The problem with this assumption is there could be combinations of things causing what is happening and some of those things, as I said before, may be undiscovered as of yet.

Then we have those people in the scientific community who believe nothing we see is real and it is just a hologram. If this is true nothing is moving at all and everything we believe is wrong. We have got to get further out into space to really see what is happening, but we also have to keep in mind space is a very dangerous place, and while we check these things out we have to be very careful.