An Essay on The Big Bang
By Anonymous. Page 2.
First, the redshifts of distant galaxies. Redshift is a Doppler effect which states that if a galaxy is moving away, the spectral line of that galaxy observed will have a shift to the red end. The faster the galaxy moves, the more shift it has. If the galaxy is moving closer, the spectral line will show a blue shift. If the galaxy is not moving, there is no shift at all.
However, as astronomers observed, the more distance a galaxy is located from Earth, the more redshift it shows on the spectrum. This means the further a galaxy is, the faster it moves. Therefore, the universe is expanding, and the Big Bang model seems more reasonable than the Steady State model.
The second observational evidence is the radiation produced by the Big Bang. The Big Bang model predicts that the universe should still be filled with a small remnant of radiation left over from the original violent explosion of the primeval fireball in the past. The primeval fireball would have sent strong shortwave radiation in all directions into space. In time, that radiation would spread out, cool, and fill the expanding universe uniformly. By now it would strike Earth as microwave radiation. In 1965 physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected microwave radiation coming equally from all directions in the sky, day and night, all year.3 So it appears that astronomers have detected the fireball radiation that was produced by the Big Bang. This casts serious doubt on the Steady State model.
The Steady State deos not explain the existence of this radiation, so the model does not best explain the beginning of the universe.
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Endnotes
1. Dinah L. Mache, Astronomy, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1987. p. 128.
2. Ibid., p. 130.
3. Joseph Silk, The Big Bang, New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1989. p. 60.
4. Terry Holt, The Universe Next Door, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985. p. 326.
5. Ibid., p. 327.
6. Charles J. Caes, Cosmology, The Search For The Order Of The Universe, USA: Tab Books Inc., 1986. p. 72.
7. John Gribbin, In Search Of The Big Bang, New York: Bantam Books, 1986. p. 273.
Bibliography
Boslough, John. Stephen Hawking's Universe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Caes, J. Charles. Cosmology, The Search For The Order Of The Universe. USA: Tab Books Inc., 1986.
Gribbin, John. In Search Of The Big Bang. New York: Bantam Books, 1986.
Holt, Terry. The Universe Next Door. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985.
Kaufmann, J. William III. Astronomy: The Structure Of The Universe. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1977.
Mache, L. Dinah. Astronomy. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1987.
Silk, Joseph. The Big Bang. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1989.
