Starlight

I thought so, too, but while seeking evidence of how daft the claim of a trigonometric measurement was I found this at the Munich Atronomical Archive (http://www.maa.clell.de/Messier/E/m106.html): Pretty neat!--Percy

Hi Slevesque,I'm a moderator, too, and we moderators tend to be a grumpy lot. I agree with Adminnemooseus that your lols often seem misplaced, but on the flip side I do think I sense a sincere desire to follow the evidence where it leads, an important quality rarely seen in creationists.--Percy

Hi riVeRraT,Some of what you said was expressed in a way where I can't tell if it represents misunderstandings or is just ambiguous, so here's my interpretation of either what you meant, or at least should have meant. The expansion of the universe is not a result of any impetus provided by the Big Bang. Rather, expansion appears to be an inherent property of the universe. And the expansion is not caused by objects moving away from each other within space. Rather, it is caused by the expansion of space itself. Space within the local group is expanding, but the galaxies of the local group are sufficiently near one another that gravity is strong enough to keep them from moving along with the expanding space. The force of gravity is not strong enough to keep more distant galaxies from retreating along with the expansion of space, and so they recede from us with increasing velocity with increasing distance. Combining replies into a single message is usually only suggested by moderators to those who have a tendency to post a bunch of consecutive short replies to many messages.--Percy

Fred Hoyle coined the term Big Bang as an attempt at derision and the name stuck. The term was never meant to be descriptive. The Big Bang was merely the rapid expansion of the universe from an extremely hot dense state.Just at the moment of the Big Bang the universe was incredibly tiny, hot and dense. All matter and energy of the universe was contained in a space tinier than an atom. And it was contained in that space not by any container, but simply because that's how big space was. There was nowhere else for matter to be but within that tiny, tiny space.The Big Bang was actually a very rapid expansion of the size of universe. From a size tinier than an atom the universe rapidly expanded, and the contents of the universe expanded with it. There was never any explosive impetus. There is, just as you say here, a force behind the expansion of space. We call it dark energy, but we don't really know what it is. But the ongoing expansion of space is not the result of space, or of matter either, being blown outward by the Big Bang. Nothing is driving them apart in the sense of any repulsive force. Again, it is space itself that is expanding, and it is carrying away with it the matter contained therein, except in cases where the matter is sufficiently dense to hold itself together despite the expanding space. There is no "leading edge" to the expansion of space. Space is expanding everywhere. The microwave background radiation arrives from all directions simultaneously everywhere throughout the universe. That's because they're not expanding, but we can measure the speed with which our local group of galaxies is receding from other local groups. We can't directly measure the expansion of space within the local group, but we infer that it is the same here as it is for everywhere else throughout the universe.--Percy

Yeah, I meant the acceleration of the expansion.--Percy