The Big Bang happened some 13 billion years ago. Before this time, as best we can tell, there was no time (or space, for that matter). If there was an

Science Explained: Where’s the Center of the Universe?

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2021-06-18 02:30:02

The Big Bang happened some 13 billion years ago. Before this time, as best we can tell, there was no time (or space, for that matter). If there was anything before the Big Bang, we can’t study it or say anything about it due to the constraints placed on us by the physics of our universe.

But what about the Big Bang itself? What can we say about this event? For example, where did it happen? And a related question, where is the center of our universe?

This is actually a pretty common question. Now, it may seem that one logical way to determine the center of the universe is to find where it all started—the original location of the Big Bang. This would be a convenient and logical place to call “the center of the universe.”

However, what many people don’t realize about the Big Bang is that it was not matter exploding into empty space. Rather, the Big Bang was space itself expanding.

When the Big Bang happened, everything was in one location. Think of it as an infinitesimally small point. Then that point expanded until we get the universe we have today. Notably, this point was the entire universe, and it expanded, so instead of the Big Bang happening in a specific part of the universe and stretching out from there, it happened everywhere.  All of space started expanding—the points between points started to stretch out—it wasn’t just growing at the edges and moving outward.

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