The horizon problem in astronomy?

D

Delight 4 U

New member
Our universe appears to be unfathomably uniform.look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other,and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere.That may not seen surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light,so there is no way heat radiation could have traveled between the two horizons to even out the hot and the cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This horizon problem is a big headache for cosmologist,so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions,'' inflation '', for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time,just after the big bang,blowing up by a factor of,well you already know the numbers in seconds,but no one knows what could have made that happen.

So in effect,inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another.A variation in the speed of light could solve the horizon problem but don't answer why the temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
Give me your best shot at this problem,and i'll stop bothering you.

-Delight
 
"...in effect,inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another..."
I'm unclear as to what this other invoked mystery is

"...the temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly..."
What about the temperature of the CMBR remains an anomaly?

I'd love to kick all this around with you, but since you don't have email shown on your profile that's pretty hard to do. My email address is available if you'd like to talk about your question.
 
I won't give you my best shot because I'd rather be a little bothered by you. :-p

But you are right in that what causes inflation and what causes it to stop is unknown. There are some hypothesis, but nothing really solid. But the interesting thing is that it explains what we see.

And we now have Dark Energy which is causing the rate of expansion of the universe to increase. Is this caused by something similar to inflation? Maybe.

Oh, by the way, if space is exanding, two points if they are far enough apart can be seperating at a speed greater than the speed of light. This does not contradict the theory of relativity. It is related to the expansion of space.
 
Why would I want you to stop posting thought provoking questions? If I'm understanding you correctly, you want a thorough explanation for why inflation occurred or an alternate example. Don't we all.
 
A Hotter, denser, younger universe actually would show a (for the most part) uniform radiation with expansion. This was actually one of the things that the Big Bang Theory predicted before the CMBR was found. But of course, they probably didn't teach you that in cult school.
 
There's also the idea that the points 28 billion light years from here were a lot closer to us when the light from those points started on its way toward us 13 billion years ago. Those points have been expanding away from us for all that time, and accelerating.
 
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