Does the universe have a centre?
Does the universe have a centre?
When it was discovered that nearly all galaxies are moving away from us, scientists wondered whether the Milky Way might be situated at the centre of the universe. Plausible as the idea may seem, it is incorrect. In reality. galaxies scarcely move, it is the space between them that stretches - just like the surface of a balloon when it is inflated. Every point moves away from every other point, but no one point is the central point on the balloon's surface. This would also be true if the universe were not curved like the balloon's surface but infinite. Although we may find this hard to imagine, even a universe of this kind would have no centre.