# continuous expansion
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/continuous-expansion/32194
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [September 6, 2000, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/continuous-expansion/32194 "2000-09-06T06:00:01Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@jb\_farley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jb_farley)
#### Post date: [September 6, 2000, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/continuous-expansion/32194/1 "2000-09-06T06:00:01Z")
A few (maybe five or six) years back, I remember reading of a theory of the universe which tried to revive the steady-state model by ingeniously coupling it to the big bang. I tcalled for smaller bang-like events to occur in space whenever regional density gets too low.
anybody know if this is still kicking around? was it disproven by COBE balloon results and the whatnot, or has there been any progress? muchos gracias.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [September 6, 2000, 6:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/continuous-expansion/32194/2 "2000-09-06T06:31:05Z")
I don’t know if or how it was specifically disproven, but I can say that I’ve never even heard that proposed, and I’ve been majoring in such things for the past five years. Offhand, I’d say that that’s not consistent with COBE or any other observation, though. There’s a lot of crackpot theories that get passed around without any basis in fact, and if we tried to specifically address all of them, there’d be no time left for the real research.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that the Universe will expand forever, and in fact, this is currently considered to be the most likely possibility. There’s just nothing to ensure a constant density, is all.
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### Author:  [@jb\_farley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jb_farley)
#### Post date: [September 6, 2000, 6:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/continuous-expansion/32194/3 "2000-09-06T06:47:43Z")
for all I know there was no guarantee of density; I may have made that up in the ensuing years. the main tenet of the theory was that there were constantly little bangs going on all through the universe in various locations.
this would have been in 1994 or 19945, and I’m positive that I read it in a journal or a magazine (like Physics or SciAm).
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### Author:  [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)
#### Post date: [September 6, 2000, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/continuous-expansion/32194/4 "2000-09-06T19:46:03Z")
I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but you may be interested in reading an article I found. I couldn’t link directly to it, but go to [this index,](http://spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov/NASA.News/NASA.News.Releases/Previous.News.Releases/93.News.Releases/93-01.News.Releases/.index.html) then click on **93-01 News Releases** and then **93-01-07**. It describes what the Cosmic Background Explorer has revealed.
> [@](#):
>
> Precise measurements made by COBE’s FIRAS of the afterglow from the Big
> Bang – the primeval explosion that began the universe approximately 15 billion
> years ago – show that 99.97 percent of the early radiant energy of the
> universe was released within the first year after the Big Bang itself. . . .
>
> All theories that attempt to explain the origin of large scale
> structure seen in the universe today now must conform to the constraints
> imposed by these latest measurements.
> This includes theories that postulate large amounts of energy released
> by such things as black holes, exploding supermassive stars or the decay of
> unstable elementary particles. In other words, there were not a lot of “little
> bangs,” as suggested by some theories.