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“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” -Maya Angelou From questions about the smallest scales to the largest, from Earthly phenomena to things we could only conceive of in theory, our Ask Ethan series is your opportunity to have anything you ask considered for a column. This week, though, is a little different than normal.
“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that’s where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it’s instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.” -Janna Levin
“Pluto was part of their mental landscape, the one they had constructed to organize their thinking about the solar system and their own place within it. Pluto seemed like the edge of existence. Ripping Pluto out of that landscape caused what felt like an inconceivably empty hole.” -Mike Brown We had an awfully busy week here on Starts With A Bang, with a number of fun and challenging posts:
Image credit: The Cosmic Perspective / Jeffrey O. Bennett, Megan O. Donahue, Nicholas Schneider and Mark Voit. From Azri -- our original question-asker -- on the topic of how long the Universe has been accelerating: "Just when you mentioned that the universe was almost 7.8 billion years old when started accelerating: I think that calculation is based on a "constant” cosmological constant! what if Dark energy was dynamical !? can one expect more than 8 bill years, lets say almost recently!" If dark energy changes over time -- which it may -- then it's conceivable that the Universe began a...