WHY IS THE UNIVERSE EXPANDING?

"And the firmament (sky) We constructed with power and skill
and verily We are expanding it."
<Qur'an-Zariyat 51:47>

  From the expansion of the Universe...

The ideas have emerged from over two thousand years of observation have had to be radically revised. In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the Universe, we now find ourselves orbiting around an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. And our galaxy itself is just one of billions of galaxies, in a Universe that is limitless and expanding. This was discovered in 1926 by Edwin Hubble.But this is far from the end of a long history of inquiry. Huge questions remain to be answered, before we can hope to have a complete picture of the Universe we live in. The expansion of the Universe is one of the most imposing discoveries of modern science. Today it is a firmly established concept and the only debate centres around the way this is taking place.

The expansion was first suggested by the General Theory of Relativity and is backed up by physics in the examination of the galactic spectrum. The regular movement towards the red section of the spectrum may be explained by the distancing of one galaxy from another. Thus the size of the Universe is probably constantly increasing and this increase will become bigger the further away the galaxies are from us. The speeds at which these celestial bodies are moving may, in the course of this perpetual expansion, go from fractions of the speed of light to speeds faster than this. Besides indicating that the Universe is expanding much faster than in the past, the chance discovery of the most distant supernova has revived a discarded theory of Albert Einstein suggesting the pervasive existence of mysterious "dark energy". Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope found the exploding star about 10 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery bolsters the startling notion that the Universe has recently begun speeding up its expansion, which scientists first speculated three years ago based on the unusually dim light from other distant supernovas. "It shows that the expanding of the Universe is really speeding up and not slowing down as conventional astronomers had thought for 70 years," said University of Chicago astronomer Michael Turner. The new stellar explosion has helped astronomers understand how the Universe expands, "much the same way a parent follows a child's growth spurts by marking a doorway," said Hubble scientist Adam Riess, lead researcher in the new study.The Universe slowed down its expansion for a time and then began a period of accelerated growth, Riess said.

" Do the unbelievers not realize that the heavens and the earth used to be one solid mass that we exploded into existence? And from water we made all living things. Would they believe? "
<Qur'an-Anbiyaa 21:30>

...to the Big Bang

Now if all these galaxies are moving away from each other, where did they come from?
In 1927, the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître was the first to propose that the Universe began with the explosion of a primeval atom. His proposal came after observing the red shift in distant nebulas by astronomers to a model of the Universe based on relativity. Years later, Edwin Hubble found experimental evidence to help justify Lemaître's theory. He found that distant galaxies in every direction are going away from us with speeds proportional to their distance.
The theory of Big Bang states that the Universe came into being as an extremely small volume full of energy which gave the Universe a very high temperature. As the Universe expanded so the fundamental atomic particles were formed as a mixture dominated by hydrogen with some helium and almost nothing else.
According to the big bang, the Universe was created sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter and in all directions.

The importance and role of astronomy in Islam