Maybe I’m misinformed about this. But I was always told matter cannot be destroyed or created. But I have been told space is constantly expanding. Is this expansion of space not made up of “matter”? Where does it come from?
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Think of all of the Cosmos as a balloon with a sponge inside of it that is stuck to all inside edges of the balloon. Now imagine that someone is continually adding air to that balloon. The sponge keeps getting stretched out further and further, and getting bigger and bigger. Over time it is getting bigger. Is it getting heavier? No. Is there more sponge matter as it gets bigger? No. It’s just stretching out more and more.
Now my analogy has several problems. Air itself in the balloon is matter that is pushing the expansion of the balloon, where in the cosmos the thing pushing all space to expand is not some material or matter (at least not that we have detected). It is Dark Energy that is pushing space to expand. What exactly is Dark Energy? That is the Nobel Prize question that many of us would like answered.
The other problem with my analogy is that the balloon has an outside edge, and from what we can tell space does not. There is an edge of the observable Universe, but that is more like looking out from a mountain top and only being able to see so far before the horizon or fog blocks your view. The cosmos might be infinite (or might not). What we are fairly certain is that there is not some hard edge where there is space (Universe) on one side and void nothing on the other.
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