If you look at the stars in any direction?

Question

you are looking in the past. That means we must be in the center. So how can the universe be expanding?

Answer 1

Imagine the universe is an expanding balloon. Galaxies are distributed all over the interior volume of the balloon. As the balloon expands, every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy, whether in the center or not.

And of course, as you say, we are looking into the past in every direction.

Answer 2

There is no center that we know of. We can only determine that we are well within it's "boundaries"

Viewing of an object from any point in the universe is looking back in time due to the fact that it takes light a certain amount of time to travel between the two objects.

When you look at someone across the room, you consider what you see to be in the present, but in actuality, there is a slight delay and you are looking a few frations of a second back into the past.

When you look at another is a huge delay and you are looking millions of years into the past. This would be true even if you were anywhere else in the universe.

Answer 3

Just because we see old light in every direction doesn't mean we are in the center. All it means is that the universe so huge that it takes light a long time to get to us from everywhere. As someone explained above, the fact that the wavelengths of the light arriving are being stretched via the Doppler effect proves that the universe is indeed expanding.

Answer 4

the reason we are looking at the past is those stars are hundreds of light years away so everything we're seeing happened hundres of years ago. the universe is expanding in all directions and this is proven by the Doppler effect when they switch from red shift to blue shift then we'll be in trouble

Answer 5

I think your statement is from the past. It takes about eight and a half minutes for the light from the Sun to reach the Earth. Using your logic, we are in the center of the Solar System and all of the planets and the sun revolve around Earth. That's a pre- Copernican statement.

Answer 6

No matter where I'm sitting in a lecture hall, the sounds I hear from the professor are in the past. Therefore, everywhere in the lecture hall is the center.

Um, no.