• Question: how big is the universe?

    Asked by greywolf01 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by littlechatterbox.
    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      We actually think it’s infinite – ie. goes on forwever. We will never be able to see all of it because light travels at a fixed (very fast) speed – so we can only see as far as light has had chance to travel since the Big Bang, but we think past that – just more universe. It’s big out there!

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      The universe is unimaginably huge! Most scientists think it has no edge, and it curves around and does weird things so you can travel in one direction for eternity and never have to stop.

      There is the ‘observable’ universe – which is all of the universe that we can see using special instruments. Some fancy calculations put us on Earth about 93 billion light years away from the edge of the observable universe – though don’t ask me how, I find the vastness of space quite scary!

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      No one knows really, and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to answer this question completely.

      But there are lots of different ideas. Most of them require you to imagine really weird things like infinite space that bends back on itself, higher dimensions and things like that like.

      There are a couple of different properties that the universe might have –
      It could be infinite (go on forever) or have limited extent (stop somewhere).
      It’s really hard to understand an infinite universe – our brains don’t really work that way, but it’s also hard to imagine that somewhere space just ‘ends’.
      Then there are even weirder properties like whether it is open or closed, flat or spherical and various other things that I don’t really understand.

      Personally I think the universe is shaped like a doughnut. Because I like doughnuts.

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      check out this very cool link http://www.scaleoftheuniverse.com/

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