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Concept
Horizon problem
Summary
The horizon problem (also known as the homogeneity problem) is a cosmological fine-tuning problem within the Big Bang model of the universe. It arises due to the difficulty in explaining the observed homogeneity of causally disconnected regions of space in the absence of a mechanism that sets the same initial conditions everywhere. It was first pointed out by Wolfgang Rindler in 1956.
The most commonly accepted solution is cosmic inflation. Different solutions propose a cyclic universe or a variable speed of light.
The distances of observable objects in the night sky correspond to times in the past. We use the light-year (the distance light can travel in the time of one Earth year) to describe these cosmological distances. A galaxy measured at ten billion light-years appears to us as it was ten billion years ago, because the light has taken that long to travel to the observer. If one were to look at a galaxy ten billion light-years away in one direction and another in the opposite direction, the total distance between them is twenty billion light-years. This means that the light from the first has not yet reached the second because the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old. In a more general sense, there are portions of the universe that are visible to us, but invisible to each other, outside each other's respective particle horizons.
In accepted relativistic physical theories, no information can travel faster than the speed of light. In this context, "information" means "any sort of physical interaction". For instance, heat will naturally flow from a hotter area to a cooler one, and in physics terms, this is one example of information exchange. Given the example above, the two galaxies in question cannot have shared any sort of information; they are not in causal contact. In the absence of common initial conditions, one would expect, then, that their physical properties would be different, and more generally, that the universe as a whole would have varying properties in causally disconnected regions.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (3)
PHYS-402: Astrophysics V : observational cosmology
Cosmology is the study of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. This course describes the principal themes of cosmology, as seen
from the point of view of observations.
PHYS-428: Relativity and cosmology II
This course is the basic introduction to modern cosmology. It introduces students to the main concepts and formalism of cosmology, the observational status of Hot Big Bang theory
and discusses major
PHYS-427: Relativity and cosmology I
Introduce the students to general relativity and its classical tests.
Related units (1)