Tuesday, June 19, 2012

How Big is the Universe?


To put it bluntly, the universe is absolutely huge! The study of Cosmology, or how the universe was created and how it has evolved, has revealed some very interesting facts. We now know that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, and that the universe seems to be roughly uniform. The approximate size of the visible universe is 10^24 miles wide! That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles! The image below represents what we believe the universe looks like. Every white spec in the image represents a galaxy, and there are over 350 billion of them! But notice how uniform it looks; there doesn't appear to be any distinct clumps of matter, its all equally spread out. This is somewhat expected  via the current cosmological theories, but also curious. Why should the universe be uniform? What properties of the beginning of the universe lead to this result, and how precise must they have been produce a uniform universe? Cosmologists are working hard on answering these questions, as astronomers continue to probe the most distant parts of the universe!


 Image credit: atlasoftheuniverse.com