I am just a high school student. I had already heard that we can't determine the exact location of big bang. So now i have a question can't we approximate it? Like say divide the observable universe in many grids and you take the Average age of each grid and do this for all the grids. I assume intuitively that on average the parts of the observable universe which were formed earlier would be closer to the point of origin of the big bang right? I know that there are other effects to consider such as expansion of space but still it is not possible so my question is why?
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Think of a large elastic sheet of cloth. Gather a few friends and now pull from all sides. It expands. By that I mean that any two points are separating and moving farther away from each other.
If you drew a mesh pattern on the cloth beforehand, you would see all mesh cells widening. All of them.
So where did the stretching start? Where is the point of origin of this stretching phenomenon?
This is unanswerable. It quite obviously did not start at just one point. Rather, it started everywhere at once.
This is how you can think of the Big Bang for an intuitive picture of why your question, as intuitive as it may feel, is unanswerable.
An unintuive part about the Big Bang that skews this analogy a bit is that you must imagine a cloth with a mesh of infinitely many infinitesimally small cells to begin with. Because the very concept of space didn't even exist before the Big Bang took place. So asking "where" had no meaning. Also, time itself didn't exist before, so I can't even meaningfully use the word "before". The Big Bang is what we call a singularity. It's an abstract topic, and the above cloth-stretching analogy good for realising this.
Steeven
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The big bang created all of space, so it happened everywhere. There was nothing, not even space, for the big bang to expand into, so there no "outside the big bang" just as there is no outside the universe (as far as we know).
Now, if you imagine the universe as having edges, you can imagine it as having a center. The problem is that we have seen no evidence of edges, a center, or even a density gradient across the observable universe. As far as the evidence we can see suggests, there is no central point and all points we observe are equally close to the point where the big bang happened.
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The radiation left over from the big bang is the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. It comes to us from all directions in space which means there is no "expansion point" in space from which everything exploded.
niels nielsen
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