Slashdot Mirror
The Universe is Pretty Big
Psiolent writes "According to a recent article on Space.com, the universe is pretty big (156 billion light years across, to be more precise). Some recent research examining 'primordial radiation imprinted on the cosmos' has led to this conclusion, as well as a few others. This finding is particularly interesting considering the universe is only 13.7 billion years old (which would mean the universe has been expanding faster than light travels), but the article does a good job addressing this seeming paradox."
You need to do better than just a copy-and-paste from google. By 1023 I presume you mean 10 to the power of 23. Otherwise I'm distinctly unimpressed.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
ok yea your right 1023 is 10^23
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Lest we forget: 2.65630387 × 10^23 leagues 3.22800182 × 10^27 cubits
Yet another signature that refers to itself. The irony and humor is dead.
does this not mean, in addition to knowing the size, the correct age is known?..
i.e. if the universe were 1 light year across, then it would be six months old, as it's expanded in all directions for that long?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The truth is out there.
an atom is very small. More on this story at ten.
Aren't we suppose to be going backward in time if we travel that fast? Or.. at least have time stand still?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
It's worth pointing out that the156 billion lyrs number is a minimum size for the universe. There's nothing in the data that tells us it's only this large.
It also doesn't tell us anything about the shape of the universe. Recent studies of the microwave background have proposed that the universe has a soccer ball or even a Picard (no relation to the TV character) shape. Neither of these have been ruled out, but the minimum size for either of these shapes in our region of space would be 156 billion lyrs. This new result doesn't even tell us if there is a boundary (no, don't ask me what happens at the edge, I don't know) or if the universe "wraps" like the Asteroids game.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas AdamsSure. There is no restriction to the rate at which spacetime can expand. Relativity only applies to the acceleration of matter.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
from the article:
A hall of mirrors could mean the universe is finite but tricks us into thinking it is infinite.
Think of it as a video game in which an object disappearing on the right side of the screen reappears on the left.
Well, shoot... thank god I tought it was just me being obtuse. I mean... at least now I know why altho it is finite, I won't hit a wall if I were to travel (or try to) 156 Billion Light Years +1 inch. Turn's out I'll just warp to the other edge... like pacman.
No sig
On the one hand the article says that the univers is 156 billion light years across, but on the other hand, it says that the universe is probably not finite. Whats up with that? Am I correct in translating to "The universe is at least 156 billion light years across?"
To think, I used to feel that it was a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts!
Appologies to Mr. Adams.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Somehow this seems like something that should be in the scientific equivalent of the Weekly World News, or the National Enquirer....
Read this quote.... (which seems to provide a basis for other comments)
"The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Light reaching us from the earliest known galaxies has been travelling, therefore, for more than 13 billion years. So one might assume that the radius of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years and that the whole shebang is double that, or 27.4 billion light-years wide."
What is our frame of reference here.... Are we still assuming we are the center of the universe, even after all the progress we've made in a variety of sciences???
Doesn't this seem to rule out the possibility of light which simply hasn't reached us yet (i.e. if we were NOT located in the middle of the Universe and it was in fact still expanding)?
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Working hard for that fp, huh?
The evidence comes from the fact that older stars must fuse carbon, nitrogen and oxygen into helium, unlike their younger bretheren that fuse pure hydrogen. The slowest part of the carbon-nitrogen-oygen reaction comes during the collision of a proton with a nitrogen-14 nucleus. Using particle accelerators to mimic the interior of older stars they have determined that the reaction occurs half as fast as estimated.
Two research teams, one from the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Padova, Italy, and the other from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have performed nearly identical experiments and their prelimiary results agree, although their findings have not yet been published.
Of course it would be easier to post "ten to the power of twenty three" if slashdot supported <sup> tags.
Anybody else not care how big the universe is, and think the most important thing in the article is the FTL possibility? Harnessing this expansion property of the universe would be quite desirable. If one could make a localized alteration of the expansion, then couldn't the distance between a spacecraft and it's point of origin be increased at a rate faster than the speed of light since neither object is actually moving? And then once the object is far nearer it's destination, could it not simply use conventional propulsion to leave the "stretched region and then have the stretched region return to it's original configuration?
No, officer, I wasn't actually going 90 miles an hour. It just seems like it because the spot in the road where I was a minute ago is a mile and a half away now.
I am no scientist, so please forgive. How come the distances between objects seem to be increasing ( space time expansion or so they say) but not their size? What makes matter so special that the space time between molecules is not expanding as well? What makes our perception so special that only the distances between objects we like to observe ( galaxies, stars) increases but not the distances within them?
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
.....except gravity... ....and quantum.... ....and light dots.... ....and EPR..... ....and the entire universe.... ...honest..
In addition to this, the observable universe has no visible boundaries which could be deemed symmetrical, as what we observe is not so much the universe itself but the contents thereof. Since the contents aren't spread symmetrically or in any particular order for that matter, any observed boundaries can't be symmetrical.
If you can't see where it ends, does that mean it ends where you no longer see it?
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
I'm surprised no one has brought this up yet, and I apologize if this seems out of context for me to be commenting, since I'm a musician and a composer, but has anyone read the article and felt that all of this information "makes sense" only if Earth is the center of the creation of universe?
We can measure the distances to far off galaxies to get a "radius", but a "radius" implies a center, primarily the Earth. I have some serious problems with us, because it implies that the "Big Bang" occurred right here, where we are now in the universe. Absolute and utter bull.
Cornish's "explanation" does not make up for the idea that we are not at the center of the creation of the universe. 156 billion light years is not a good number to go by, then, because it doesn't take into account for how far we are from the creation site.
Unless Cornish or anyone else can pinpoint exactly where the Big Bang (or Big Burp or whatever else it's been called over the years) has occurred, this article is completely and utterly pointless.
Please prove me wrong. I study Debussy and Schoenberg, so I may have no right commenting, but this seems like common sense to me.
- wafwot
you forgot spam.
The big bang did indeed ocurr right where earth is. it also ocurred where alpha centauri is, and where the Andromeda galaxy is. the big bang *was* the universe. Trying to pin it down is like trying to draw on a balloon with a pen the exact location of the unblown balloon.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
156 billion lightyears. It must be US billion, which is only 10^9 lightyears. The rest of the world user billion egual to 10^12.
Space is big
Space is dark
It's hard to find
A place to park
Burma Shave
In fact, that's what I originally types and was surprised to find the tags ignored.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
who immediatly thought of....
Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough.
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff!
Just - re-member that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
and revolving at 900 miles an hour,
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
it's 100,000 light-years side-to-side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick,
but out by us it's just 3000 light-years wide.
We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point,
we go round every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whizz,
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there's bugger all down here on Earth.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."
I understand the concept that everything is getting further from everything else, not just the outer edge is getting further from the center, every point is moving away from every other point. But the question still remains: where did those other 999 light years stretch out into?
You can't tell me the rim of the universe moved 1 light year from the center, but the distance to the center from the rim has grown by 1000 light years, that makes no sense, the expanding universe inside the rim would have to pass the rim as it expanded.
For this to work then space - as in actual volume, or distance - would have to be being created (brought into existance from nothingness) not only at the "rim" of the universe, but in between every point as well. Which brings up an odd paradox of how can the universe be of a certain size, if at every moment that size increases not just by the expansion rate, but by an amount proportional to the total volume of the universe? Indeed technically (this is kind of a chicken-egg arguement) it is still only expanding at the rim and the "expansion" from inside instantaneously increases the size of the universe w/o physically pushing the rim out any faster.
I propose a different theory altogether, I'm not taking credit for this, and in fact I'm sure some observant slashdotter can point out what book cover it was that I read in B&N that I got this idea from, but I forget who it was by.
What if the speed of light changes, as in at the beginning of time, light was faster than it is now? That to me certainly makes a lot more sense than this nonsense about the universe expanding at the speed of light but somehow points inside of its boundary can move apart without "overflowing" the boundary.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
156 billion light years across
Uh, what's that in kilometers? If it ain't metric, most of the world won't understand... Non-metric units are too hard.
Ok, use the old notation 10**23.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Beside this, double asterisks and circumflexes are completely unnecessary kludges for web sites because HTML is completely capable of handling superscripts! A web site that describes itself as "news for nerds" and does not support superscripts and subscripts is pretty sad!
Don't add at high speeds. If A and B are both moving away from me in opposite directions at 0.6c, they they are NOT moving at 1.2c relative to each other.
By "fixed point" I assuemt you mean at rest in an inertial frame. There are no fixed points in special relativity.
Helium balloons want to be free.
I was using stupid IRT opening my mouth when I likely should have just read on, but this is slashdot and stuck my foot right in.
Thanks
I'm reminded of course of many(NOT ALL) scientists and "experts" who claimed that bad things would happen at 762mph. And at 100mph.
I'm fascinated by the discussion, and would like to get back to studying some of the more arcane areas of physics, But whenever someone is so dogmatic about a pyramid of theories that cannot(YET I HOPE) be thoroughly tested I get that twitch and jump right in
Of course being a young earth(and universe) creationist I jump fairly quickly and sometimes too rabidly on the age of the universe stuff
And since we can't measure c except for today, we don't know if it was faster or slower 100 years ago or 500, or 5000 or 50 000. And it will likely be 10-20 years before we can accurately determine if it is in fact changing. and at what rate.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
If you were running a popular forum, and the page wideners and lengtheners found a way to abuse <sup> and <sub> elements, wouldn't you turn off those tags?
Oh, and it also proves that we never landed on the Moon. And don't forget the fact that the stars in the sky are just holes in the crystal sphere that surrounds the flat Earth.
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
light isn't the fastest moving think... Bad news is!
I thought gravity's velocity was still up in the air. And what are "light dots"?