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
