Theories and best guesses are all we can do to understand that which is too far away to really "know". For a while now cosmologists have been talking about the need to add variables they call dark energy and dark matter to their equations in order to make their calculations for why the universe is expanding work. But even expansion and the speed of it are guesses for you cannot calculate the distance of a star with out the brightness or the brightness without the distance; calculations from which you then determine a little thing called the red shift, ya da ya da... I say this not out of disrespect for the incredible minds that spend their hours thinking on these matters but rather because I am so in awe of how little we "really know" about what we see 'out there'. Even with the naked eye each evening, I am blessed to be able to be able to see around 3,000 'stars' on a moonless night and I wonder, the same questions humans have wondered for millennia. In those moments it is hard not to feel a kinship with every human who has, is, or will gaze upon the heavens with more questions than answers.
The only thing the following article can tell us for sure is that our best observations lead us to believe with some certainty that our universe does not exist in a void....
SkyandTelescope.com - News from Sky & Telescope - Best-yet Universe Expansion Measurement
