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The Endless Expansion of the Universe: Why Can Steady-State Universe Theory Explain the Endless Space?
In cosmology, the steady-state model, or steady-state theory, provides an alternative to the Big Bang theory. According to the steady-state model, as the universe expands, the density of matter remains constant because of the continuous creation of matter in the universe, making the theory follow the principle of perfect cosmology, which states that the observable universe is at any time It's always the same everywhere.
The steady-state universe model implies that the universe has no beginning and no end. However, this view faces increasing observational challenges.
Looking back at history, the expansion of the universe was discovered through the observations of Edwin Hubble. At the time, the static model of the universe proposed by Einstein in 1917 was considered unstable. The Big Bang theory, first proposed by Georges Lemaître, holds that the universe has a finite age and evolves through cooling, expansion, and gravitational collapse. In the steady-state model, although the universe is expanding, its appearance does not change over time, consistent with the principle of perfect cosmology. The theory's developers, Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle, published a seminal 1948 paper proposing a continuous creation process. A physical model of the universe.
However, during observations in the 1950s and 1960s, steady-state models began to show problems. Observations at that time showed that the universe was indeed changing. Extremely luminous galactic-free sources, such as quasars and radio galaxies, are only discovered at vast distances, meaning they only existed in the past and differ from the distribution predicted by steady-state models. The predictions of the Big Bang theory were confirmed, and subsequent statistical tests quickly ruled out the feasibility of the steady-state model.
Observational evidence shows that the universe is not static, a discovery that contributed to the dominance of the Big Bang theory.
The discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation also marks a further failure of the steady-state model. The uniformity of this radiation and the near-ideal blackbody spectrum are difficult to explain by the production of most stardust sources, which clearly points to the plausibility of the Big Bang theory. Even among proponents of the theory, hope for flaws is increasingly being dismissed. In this environment, the appeal of the steady-state model has gradually waned, and its adherents are faced with an irrefutable reality.
In addition to observational results, one of the fundamental assumptions of steady-state theory, the Cosmological Principle, has also been challenged in recent years. The latest observations of the universe show that the universe is not completely symmetrical in all directions and positions, hampering the effectiveness of steady-state models. To this point, scientists found some apparent anomalies, including hemispheric biases in measurements of the cosmic microwave background.
Many new large structural discoveries challenge the requirement for uniformity, some of which are beyond what the Standard Model can explain.
In 1993, scientists Fred Hoyle, George Burbage and Jayant Narlikar proposed a new steady-state view, namely Quasi-Steady cosmology. State Cosmology, QSS). This model attempts to explain new observational data that early steady-state theories failed to cope with, proposing that while the universe is constantly being created, other minibangs occur. But despite the new ideas, the QSS model is still considered by mainstream scientists to have many unresolved problems.
In general, although the steady-state universe theory received some support in the early days of its proposal, its status has been increasingly marginalized as observational evidence has flourished. Today, the scientific community is almost unanimous in believing that the Big Bang theory is the best model to explain the origin of the universe. So, what kind of imagination and discovery will there be about the future of our universe?
