Oh wow, completely missed the word 'orbit' in that question. Oops. :embarrassed:
My thinking is assuming a universe with only the earth contained within it, if you shot an object from the surface of the Earth at the speed of light, the inverse square law of gravity will continue to exert a pulling force on the object for infinity until eventually it will be pulled back towards the Earth.
Does the same force that is expanding the universe actually affect atomic particles as well?
No. The expansion is at such scales much weaker than the forces that keep particles together.
The expansion is just 74 km every second for every Megaparsec of distance. Which is an unbelieveable large distance. Pluto is about one light day away from Earth. One Megaparsec is 3260000 light years, or about 1,000,000,000 light-days, very coarsely calculated.
This means the distance Earth to Pluto would just grow by about 74 micrometers every second. It would take a few thousand years for this distance growing by a single meter.
I didn't check your conversion for a Pluto distance, but there are 60*60*24*365 = 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Then taking the 74 microns per second number at face value, this would be 2,300 meters, 2.3 km, in a single year.
Bob Clark
I didn't check your conversion for a Pluto distance, but there are 60*60*24*365 = 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Then taking the 74 microns per second number at face value, this would be 2,300 meters, 2.3 km, in a single year.
Bob Clark
That's right. Pluto isn't a light-day away though.
So essentially many many many years in the future, it will not be possible to see other galaxlies or even stars as they have all sped past the speed of light away from us?
A bleak prospect indeed
Could someone explain why inflation works as a solution to the "Horizon Problem?"
Could the aether be the cause of the expansion of the universe?
If in fact the Aether exists at all, it could be slowly expanding away from us delaying the light that we see from other galaxies and stars giving us the illusion of an ever expanding universe?
:hmm: