If space is expanding, though, wouldn't the space between our atoms be expanding also, and proportionally everything would stay the same to our bodies?
No. The article addresses this. The accelerating expansion of the universe exerts a small outward force on objects, leading them to be in a steady state size that is very slightly larger than they would otherwise be.
I got curious and looked up the expansion rate of the universe. It's 74.3 km/s per megaparsec, in other words 2.4 × 10^-18 Hz, or about 8 × 10^-11 year^-1. So each year one meter becomes one meter + the size of a hydrogen atom. Not very quick.
4 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] thread