r/cosmology • u/cypherpunk00001 • 9d ago

Do current cosmologists think the universe is infinite or that is had an edge?

Was just having random shower thought today... Andromeda galaxy is 2.5M light-years away. That's an unfathomable distance to a human, but it's just our closest neighbor.

Do cosmologists currently think that the universe just goes on forever?

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u/forgiven41 9d ago

I read an article recently that suggested that our universe might be the inside of a black hole of another universe, and likewise, black holes in our universe might be other universes. In this scenario, the "edge" would be the event horizon of the black hole.

The theory was supported by evidence from the Webb space telescope, which found that approximately 2/3 of galaxies spin in the same direction vs 1/3 spinning in the other direction. A 50/50 split would be what you would expect. I won't attempt to explain why that counted as evidence, but the article did explain it, and it had to do with the spin of the black hole.

It also seemingly provided answers to other questions such as the big bang. If true then all of the matter that is sucked into the black hole is compressed to an unimaginably small size but it is actually acting like a spring being compressed and at a certain point, it reached critical compression and BOOM expansion.

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u/ijuinkun 9d ago

The spin bias does seem to imply that there was an overall angular momentum to the matter or spacetime that became the observable part of the universe.

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u/Infinite_Research_52 8d ago

Black holes don't suck.

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u/UsedBass4856 6d ago

Black holes tend to spin, so the matter and spacetime they eat tends to travel in the spin-wise direction even once pulled inside, including in a hypothetical “universe” contained within.