Thread: If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?

When you blow up a balloon it expands into the room, another space. So, what is the universe expnding into. Thoughts?

no one can know that, it's really strange question ??

Strange, but its happening :)
The universe is Expanding.
I've seen something about that on Discovery Science, but can't remember the name.
Actually we don't know where the universe starts from and where does it ends.
Did you know only 1% of the whole universe is discovered.
Interesting Question, indeed.

"What is the Universe expanding into?" This question is based on the ever popular misconception that the Universe is some curved object embedded in a higher dimensional space, and that the Universe is expanding into this space. This misconception is probably fostered by the balloon analogy which shows a 2-D spherical model of the Universe expanding in a 3-D space. While it is possible to think of the Universe this way, it is not necessary, and there is nothing whatsoever that we have measured or can measure that will show us anything about the larger space. Everything that we measure is within the Universe, and we see no edge or boundary or center of expansion. Thus the Universe is not expanding into anything that we can see, and this is not a profitable thing to think about. Just as Dali's Corpus Hypercubicus is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D object that represents the surface of a 4-D cube, remember that the balloon analogy is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D situation that is supposed to help you think about a curved 3-D space, but it does not mean that there is really a 4-D space that the Universe is expanding into."

Copy and pasted, but it should answer the question...in a way.

The contents of the universe are expanding outwards; if the universe is infinite as we tend to believe, then it's not actually expanding "into" anything except itself. Nothing surrounds the universe except our universe itself.

our universe is one of the billions of universes that exist in what one may call a 'super-universe'. think of the billions of stars in the milky way galaxy alone, which is in fact, one of the billions of galaxies within our universe. this is where human understasnding comes to a halt. with time and space so violently twisted and warped around the outskirts of our universe, the laws of physics, as we know them, become useless. It's literally beyond human comprehension. the acceleration in the expansion of our universe can be explained by the effects of 'neighboring' universes within this 'super-universe'. whether these are simply gravitational effects (as in the way one celestial body can affect another celestial body's orbit) remains to be known. this 'super-universe' could very well be playing with more than 4 fundamental forces, which is what our understanding is limited to.

Definitely a strange question..
Could we bring the idea of dark matter in to this? Now that would be an interesting discussion!

There are really two reasonable answers to this question. Either there is only one universe and there is nothing outside of it. Literally nothing. Saying that it can't expand because there is nothing to expand into is just an issue with the English language. Think of sticking a gas in a vacuum. It expands into nothing but space. Sort of similar, except in the case of the universe space is expanding into nothing, and talking about what that nothing is is pointless, because it's nothing. The other possible answer is that our universe is in some higher dimension verse. In that higher verse there are lots of other universes. They may interact, or it may be impossible for them to interact. There are numerous theories out there with different ways to explain this higher verse and everything about it, so I won't go into them.

Now to clear up some errors people posted:
The universe may or may not be infinite. We don't know and unless we somehow see a border (which we probably won't) we'll never know.
Dark matter has nothing to do with this question, so no it wouldn't be an interesting discussion.
Saying that only 1% of the universe has been discovered makes no sense, since we don't know how big the universe is.

Originally Posted by DaegonPhyn

Dark matter has nothing to do with this question, so no it wouldn't be an interesting discussion..

It is possible that the universe is expanding into dark matter. Given that no-one knows what dark matter is, or if it actually exists, given that it's existence is theorised from observational anomalies in mass, and it has never actually been detected.

One could say that there is no such thing as nothing, but in the absence of anything else there is dark matter, which forms the back drop for this and any other universe, and therefore the universe is expanding into dark matter.