The universe is not shaped like a ball

Often when people think of something like the Big Bang, which is still highly speculative, they imagine the known universe starting as a single point or a small ball that blew up and began expanding.

But what is actually ball-shaped is what we are able to observe. We can see an equal distance in all directions. When we’re told that the universe is expanding, that further reinforces the idea of the universe being a ball shape, but that’s not really what the evidence shows.

What we do know is that the space between galaxies in the universe is continuously expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. We also know that the expansion began approximately 13.8 billion years ago. In other words, the density of the universe started decreasing at that time, and space between objects started increasing.

But a big question is: Was space also infinite at that time? At the time of the so-called Big Bang, the universe was perhaps more compact or dense, but there is no evidence that it all started from a single point.

There is also no evidence that infinity does not exist. But there’s one more big question: Why are the oldest objects in the universe we can observe about 13.8 billion years old?

That we can answer fairly well. It’s because matter in the universe was so dense at that time that light couldn’t move freely. The universe was a very dense soup of matter, and as it expanded, more particles began to form and we eventually got hydrogen and other elements.

So we know a lot about the state of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, and we know that it started expanding at that time, but we have no evidence to support the idea that it began as a single point or a ball exploding in space. It was just more dense, and that’s about all we know.

We’ve been thinking in a bubble for a long time 🙂