Tech-Space| How Big is the Universe?

Dhyann · 发表于 2019-06-11 17:29:50

[h2 id="the-observable-universe" style="text-align: center;"]The observable universe[/h2][p]

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[p style="text-align: center;"]In 2013, the European Space Agency's Planck space mission released the most accurate and detailed map ever map of the universe's oldest light. The map revealed that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. Planck calculated the age by studying the cosmic microwave background.

[p style="text-align: center;"]"The cosmic microwave background light is a traveler from far away and long ago," Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "When it arrives, it tells us about the whole history of our universe."

[p style="text-align: center;"]Because of the connection between distance and the speed of light, this means scientists can look at a region of space that lies 13.8 billion light-years away. Like a ship in the empty ocean, astronomers on Earth can turn their telescopes to peer 13.8 billion light-years in every direction, which puts Earth inside of an observable sphere with a radius of 13.8 billion light-years. The word "observable" is key; the sphere limits what scientists can see but not what is there.

[p style="text-align: center;"]Centering a sphere on Earth's location in space might seem to put mankind in the center of the universe. However, like that same ship in the ocean, we cannot tell where we lie in the enormous span of the universe. Just because we cannot see land does not mean we are in the center of the ocean; just because we cannot see the edge of the universe does not mean we lie in the center of the universe.

[h2 id="even-bigger" style="text-align: center;"]Even bigger?[/h2][p]

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[p style="text-align: center;"]Scientists measure the size of the universe in a myriad of different ways. They can measure the waves from the early universe, known as baryonic acoustic oscillations, that fill the cosmic microwave background. They can also use standard candles, such as type 1A supernovae, to measure distances. However, these different methods of measuring distances can provide answers.

[p style="text-align: center;"]How inflation is changing is also a mystery. While the estimate of 92 billion light-years comes from the idea of a constant rate of inflation, many scientists think that the rate is slowing down. If the universe expanded at the speed of light during inflation, it should be 10^23, or 100 sextillion.

[p style="text-align: center;"]Instead of taking one measurement method, a team of scientists led by Mihran Vardanyan at the University of Oxford did a statistical analysis of all of the results. By using Bayesian model averaging, which focuses on how likely a model is to be correct given the data, rather than asking how well the model itself fits the data. They found that the universe is at least 250 times larger than the observable universe, or at least 7 trillion light-years across.

[h2 id="the-shape-of-the-universe" style="text-align: center;"]The shape of the universe[/h2][p style="text-align: center;"]

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[p style="text-align: center;"]The size of the universe depends a great deal on its shape. Scientists have predicted the possibility that the universe might be closed like a sphere, infinite and negatively curved like a saddle, or flat and infinite.

[p style="text-align: center;"]A finite universe has a finite size that can be measured; this would be the case in a closed spherical universe. But an infinite universe has no size by definition.

[p style="text-align: center;"]According to NASA, scientists know that the universe is flat with only about a 0.4 percent margin of error (as of 2013). And that could change our understanding of just how big the universe is.

[p style="text-align: center;"]"This suggests that the universe is infinite in extent; however, since the universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the universe," NASA says on their website. "All we can truly conclude is that the universe is much larger than the volume we can directly observe."

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[h4 style="text-align: center;"]What do You think About this? Comment Below ![/h4][p style="text-align: center;"]Source:- Space