How Large is the Universe?
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The universe has long captivated us with its immense scales of distance and time. How far does it stretch? Where does it end, and what lies beyond its star fields and streams of galaxies extending as far as telescopes can see? These questions are beginning to yield to a series of extraordinary new lines of investigation and technologies that are letting us to peer into the most distant realms of the cosmos. But also at the behavior of matter and energy on the smallest of scales. Remarkably, our growing understanding of this kingdom of the ultra-tiny, inside the nuclei of atoms, permits us to glimpse the largest vistas of space and time. In ancient times, most observers saw the stars as a sphere surrounding the earth, often the home of deities. The Greeks were the first to see celestial events as phenomena, subject to human investigation rather than the fickle whims of the Gods. One sky-watcher, for example, suggested that meteors are made of materials found on Earth... and might have even come from the Earth. Those early astronomers built the foundations of modern science. But they would be shocked to see the discoveries made by their counterparts today. The stars and planets that once harbored the gods are now seen as infinitesimal parts of a vast scaffolding of matter and energy extending far out into space. Just how far began to emerge in the 1920s. Working at the huge new 100-inch Hooker Telescope on California's Mt. Wilson, astronomer Edwin Hubble, along with his assistant named Milt Humason, analyzed the light of fuzzy patches of sky... known then as nebulae. They showed that these were actually distant galaxies far beyond our own. Hubble and Humason discovered that most of them are moving away from us. The farther out they looked, the faster they were receding. This fact, now known as Hubble's law, suggests that there must have been a time when the matter in all these galaxies was together in one place. That time, when our universe sprung forth, has come to be called the Big Bang. How large the cosmos has gotten since then depends on how long its been growing and its expansion rate. Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus... That the universe dates back 13.7 billion years. Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time ... 13.7 billion light years. That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers. In fact, it's even bigger.... Much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery. That the universe could expand had been predicted back in 1917 by Albert Einstein, except that Einstein himself didn't believe it until he saw Hubble and Humason's evidence. Einstein's general theory of relativity suggested that galaxies could be moving apart because space itself is expanding. So when a photon gets blasted out from a distant star, it moves through a cosmic landscape that is getting larger and larger, increasing the distance it must travel to reach us. In 1995, the orbiting telescope named for Edwin Hubble began to take the measure of the universe... by looking for the most distant galaxies it could see. Taking the expansion of the universe into account, the space telescope found galaxies that are now almost 46 billion light years away from us in each direction... and almost 92 billion light years from each other. And that would be the whole universe... according to a straightforward model of the big bang. But remarkably, that might be a mere speck within the universe as a whole, according to a dramatic new theory that describes the origins of the cosmos.
Comments
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If the universe is expanding why my dick is still on 2 inches?
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So if the observable universe is 98 billion light years across and the entire universe is 10^25 times larger, the diameter of the universe is 9.8^32 light years, that's 980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 light years or 9.27154863129184^48 meters.
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and they said the universe came from nothing that is illogic
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제발 과학이 빨리개발되서 나죽기전에 살아생전 우주한번가서 화성이라도 가봤음조켓내ㅠㅠ 우주는 보면볼수록 신기하고 끝이없이 넓군요ㅎㅎ
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I'm just wondering if there is enough space out there for the universet fit in.
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how fantastic
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George Bush did it
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What if there's more universes
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How small is the universe. All depending on your size! Infinity large and infinity small. Size is only a physical restriction. Does spacetime require size? Or is size a byproduct of spacetime. This doc was trash you know! Utterly crap lol
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Ultimately our understanding of reality is limited by our brain capacity. Our perceptions are confined to the small sliver of reality of which our brains can comprehend. From an evolutionary perspective this is perfectly useful since it allows us to focus on the aspects of the world which will affect our survival. However it poses a significant obstacle when trying to understand the fundemarental nature of reality, it may simply be beyond our capacity.
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they say, we can see 92milion lightyears away, but at 16:00 he said this is the universe 650 milion lightyears away, either way, mind boggling
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H QURAN SAYS ,
12 PLANETS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM AND 6 MORE UNIVERSE ABOVE OUR UNIVERSE, -
imagine that the universe is a stomach of a wierd creature and there is a millions of this creature oh shitttt!!
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i think God knows we can't reach more than our solar system or galaxy
and i believe there are another intelligent creature out there , but not intelligent enough to go between galaxy
God organize us (human and alien)to cant reach each other . it just make live , galaxy , time and space keep balance -
I've watched this video probably 50 times and still pick up on something each time i watch.
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this presentation is not for simple minds, it baffles even the most complex thinkers, but I will continue to study with awe and an open mind..
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If all this universe is coming from one atom .how that atom apeied.
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Did he just say the Observable Universe is a Small Speck to the Whole Universe ??
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It seems a bit ridiculous to map the entire universe when we don't even have the means to travel to Alpha Centauri. Humans may be too frail and puny to deal with inter-stellar travel. Our human lifespan is incredibly short for the cosmic scale. There may be intelligent life out there that are much more durable than we are. Our sun isn't very large on a cosmic scale. Imagine if there are life forms on planets with suns 100X larger than ours. Those lifeforms may be 100X our size and have lifespans 100X longer than ours. Such being's technology would easily be far greater than we could ever hope to achieve.
Honestly, what's the purpose of a universe so large and I don't even want to think of something that's truly infinite in size if that is what it is. I've often wondered if the universe is actually a living organism because that might make some sort of sense for its existence. A huge lifeless void is an incredibly huge waste of space if it serves no real purpose.
A single universe is hard enough to grasp but when talking about multiverses, that's even crazier. Then what the heck are all those multiverses floating in? Some sort of super-verse cloud? -
How could something so interesting be made to sound so boring...
My 8 yr old loves all this stuff. She suddenly blurted out "this one is boring this guy sounds too boring"
And I just thought it sucked Bc it wasn't new to me-
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