“If the universe is expanding uniformly in all directions, why would objects farther away appear to recede faster?

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Read this phrase from Hubblesite and was confused, “In 1929, Edwin Hubble provided the first observational evidence for the universe having a finite age. Using the largest telescope of the time, he discovered that the more distant a galaxy is from us, the faster it appears to be receding into space. This means that the universe is expanding uniformly in all directions.”

If the speed of expansion is uniform, shouldn’t distance not even be a variable?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine two points on a rubber band that are nearly touching one another. When you stretch the rubber band as much as possible, those two points are still going to be relatively close together. But the distance between two points that were separated by an inch are now much more than an inch apart.

When things expand or stretch, the space between points increases: more space between starting points means more expansion between them as they are stretched away. On astronomical scales this means that the distance between distant galaxies is increasing faster than the distance between neighboring galaxies.

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