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Universe 250+ Times Bigger Than What Is Observable
eldavojohn writes "The universe is only fourteen billion years old so we are unable to observe anything more than fourteen billion light years away. This makes it a bit difficult for us to measure how large the universe actually is. A number of methodologies have been devised to estimate the size of the universe including the universe's curvature, baryonic acoustic oscillations and the luminosity of distant type 1A supernovas. Now a team has combined all known methods into Bayesian model averaging to constrain the universe's size and their research is saying with confidence that the universe is at least 250 times larger than the observable universe."
...
As good science as flat earth.
Because I'm hard-science light.. I thought c was considered an boundary of some sort.. would this imply the ability for matter to travel faster then c?
Urgh, hated doing that in Computer Science lectures.
I mean, what's at the outer edge? A wall?
If the universe started with a big bang, with all matter originated in an extremely compact volume, and if it's radius can't expand faster than light, then there should be no points in the universe beyond what we can see (as limited by light speed.) What am I missing?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Can we now be done with all these "my universe is bigger" disputes? Or is someone else going to come along now and say it's 500 times larger?
First, How can you use a bayesian model to average results into a precise number?
Second, Why are you bothering to do this from theories on top of inelegant theories?
Third, if the universe actually is that size What does that mean for the heat death of the universe?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I recall reading a Scientific American article that indicated that the Universe had infinite size and mass, meaning that probabilistically, the exact construction and configuration of our observable universe would repeat itself (infinity tends to have nasty implications like that). Or to put it another way, another you is reading this somewhere (actually, an infinite number of you's, to be precise).
But crazy conjecture aside, does this talk of the 'full size' of the universe mean that the article even had its starting premise wrong?
Take that Creationism!
The bigger the fool the more confidence they have.
From what I gather, we're stuck somewhere in the middle-ish of the universe. What if were were located near the "edge" of the expanding universe, and the "edge" was within our observable light cone. What would we see? Nothing? or is the "edge" of the universe expanding faster than the speed of light, therefore one could never see the "edge"?
Did you read the wiki page submitter. The universe is expanding, so we can observe items that are now 40 billion light years away.
until the 20th century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear.
since the inital publication of the charged electromagnetic spectrum, humans learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear...is less than one millionth of reality.
It's more than a MILLION times bigger, in fact!
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
The first sentence of the description of this article is incorrect. Due to the expansion of the universe the most distant observable objects are further away then the 13.75 (-ish) billion light years that corresponds to the universe's age.
Hilariously, this is stated in both linked sources. In the article, it is even in the first paragraph!
A complete misapplication of Bayesian statistics. There is no viable prior for these quantities (except maybe that they must be some real number?), and therefore Bayesian statistics tells you nothing. The "answer" you get is just a function of the "prior" you made up. Garbage in, garbage out.
What would the edge of the universe be. If we say it has a size it must have a wall, or maybe it just thins out like dropping a pile of flour on the counter. My theory is that the universe is spherical, and if you were to travel in a straight line long enough, you would return to the same point. One other theory is that it butts up to the next dimension of our universe.
if the universe is 15 billion light years and that's only 1/250th of the space. Empty space? parallel universe. Is the universe this big giant godly fart? :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
If the universe is 14 billion years old and is roughly spherical, then the outer limit of what we could observe could be as much as 28 billion light years away, but probably less since we're somewhere in the interior.
That's why Stargate Universe ends: they figured out they can't reach the edge of the Universe in just a few seasons, to figure out what that mystery is all about.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't our observable constrain be 14 billion light years IF we were at the epicenter of the big bang?
Instead, shouldn't there be some area of the sky that we can only find much younger stars, and others that appear further away?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
we can see much smaller than farther? i would have thought both were infinite?
That is some interesting numbers but that almost indicates that the radius would be more than ~6 times thus the universe is actually ~88 billion years old... yeah crude math aside... still way more than before.
The size of the observable universe is actually bigger than 13.7 billion light years, it's actually explained in the Wikipedia article linked....
Don't forget one important thing.... When we peer out to the outer edges of the observable universe, we're seeing the galaxies as they were 14 billion years ago. If scientists are saying the universe is only 14 billion years OLD then we're seeing galaxies that were just born. So, those galaxies look nothing like the way they appear to us. They might not even be anywhere near their aparent location, or they might not even exist anymore!! But, the light they gave off 14 billion years ago is still traveling through space. So, this complication kinda changes things. This 250x number they came up with is in relation to what? The "observable" universe has changed since the light was given off (that we're now seeing.)
Why such a strange prior? I understand that they believe that the curvature is 0, but how do they know they should drop it down so quickly? What about the rest of the prior, why does it look so strange? What would happen if they changed the prior. I'm guessing that tweaking the prior would yield greatly different universe sizes.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
So, does this mean there are approximately ( 4 * pi * 250^3 ) / 3 more stars than we thought there were?
Which city is closest to the center of the Earth?
That is, what point on the earth's surface is the 'middle'?
When you can answer that, you might begin to see that talking about the epicenter of the big bang isn't really going to get you anywhere.
As a smart man (Einstein) once put it, everything is relative.
Beverly:
If there's nothing wrong with me...maybe there's something wrong with the universe!
Here's one you shouldn't be able to answer...
Computer, what is the nature of the universe?
Computer:
The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
In 50yrs we'll find the universe is 500+ times larger. Heisenberg is rolling in his grave.
IANAP, INEAS (I'm not even a scientist),
but I'm interested in astrophysics and never really found a clear explanation for a dummy like me :
This seems to imply that the universe is expanding much quicker than the speed of light, or at least did so during a period before now. How is that even possible ? And does this mean that the speed of light is correlated with this expansion speed, and can vary over time ?
Don't mock me, and thanks if you clarify this.
like my belly button (poke)(sniff)
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Pix or it didn't happen.
The submitter obviously did not read his own links. While the universe is only 14 billion years old, the _observable_ universe is > 90 billion light years across.
This is due to expansion, which stretched the wavelength of the light coming towards us, so redshifting those galaxies. It also makes those galaxies appear to be moving away from us at many multiples the speed of light, although they're not really moving at all, space is expanding.
An explanation
Which of the infinite number of universes are they referring to?
Shouldn't the title contain an (x) or a (*) or something? Doesn't make sense otherwise...
In the early days people thought the earth was flat..
These days we know that is not true:
'The earth is round.. Like a pancake...' (H. Finkers)
Hmm, I just don't understand this relatively stuff. So if the universe is 3500 billion light year across (14 billion * 250 times larger) and it is 14 billion years old it expanded at 125 time the speed of light (on the average). Sigh.
take offense to this comment. I/We/Gaia have beautifully curved boundaries that I/We/Gaia are proud of. In our assimilation of the galaxy, we will make sure to prioritize your solar system and eradicate this stupidity.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
the truth.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Personally, I believe that the universe is fractal - in every way, shape and form. Now if I could only figure out why it is and -why- that matters. No matter what scientists or theologists say, it doesn't answer that very fundamental question. God, M-theory, quantum physics, holographic universes, big bang - it's all the same to me.
What is the so-called 'end-game' of all of this? There seems to be no reason for anything. It just is - and continues to be. For what reason? Does it serve any purpose -at all-? If all life (that being absolutely everything that exists) is energy, where does that energy come from and why?
Sorry for going on, but subjects like this have bothered me (us) throughout my life. I wish I could find the answers - perhaps someday we will. :-)
Source
It is, but oddly enough that does not bind the expansion. Space can be expanding faster than c and I believe the inflationary theory says just that.
It did so for a VERY short while following the big bang: a period of superluminal expansion known as the Inflationary Epoch.
Physicists like to separate notable periods in time on a logarithmic scale, referring to each as the "Whatever" Epoch. As novel as the system itself is, what's most novel is how tiny of a portion of it our planet will be around for.
Recommended reading for the curious.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Come on, only 250+? I would have thought 252+ at LEAST...
By far, that is my top favorite ST:TNG episode. Not sure why. (maybe it's my thing for redheads...)
8==8 Bones 8==8
Dear Slashdot Readers
This article (and subsequent posts) have demonstrated that the once trusted car analogy is no longer in favour and from now on, complicated subjects should be explained using balloons instead.
Thank you for your co-operation in welcoming our new balloon overloads. Or something.
Relativity says that no particle can go faster than c, but that does not imply the universe can't expand faster than c. Here's why:
The universe is a space, like a blank sheet of paper, which can hold particles. The paper itself is free to expand. If the entire sheet is expanding uniformly (think: anything you draw on the paper just gets bigger), then clearly the "velocity" between two points is proportional to the distance between them. For our universe, v = H*d, where H is the Hubble constant. If d is large enough, the "velocity" might exceed c. But this does not violate relativity because in any little patch of the universe the speed limit remains c.
So based on this new estimate, the Great Galactic Barrier is further, and all of this time we have been afraid to voyage out to far and fall off the edge... Perhaps the final frontier is further out there! Now if we can just get DARPA or NASA to fund the Cochrane or Cubierre drive...
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
For those of you who did not bother to read the whole article, there's a really important nugget that's lost in the 250+ times headline. The results show that the most likely curvature of the universe = 0. This means the universe, as near as our best minds can tell, is infinite. All the same dusting of galaxies in every direction, infinitely. Infinity is not a concept most people grasp easily. People ask things like "what's outside the universe?" but there is no outside, as "directionality" or "position" have no meaning outside the context of the universe. Likewise, there's no "before" the universe, as time has no meaning outside the context of the universe. My instinct says that we'll eventually come up with a nifty model of reality that includes a non-intuitive description of "position" that causes everything to make mathematical sense and has both quantum physics and relativity as predictable consequences.. but that is pure speculation. And it's a sure bet it'll be even harder to wrap our heads around than what we have now.
points of a circle are on x^2 + y^2 = r^2, so the circle ends at r + epsilon.
Great. Wait until we see our real estate tax bill this year.
Of course, we should be able to get a few more dollars for it when we sell.
That's life!
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
than what is observable, isn't it time you invested in online with the Gold Standard?
The light has been travelling for 14 billion years. But it might have got half way in the first nanosecond.
But at the end, there is a restaurant!
If our universe has lower limits on size and duration, so must there be upper limits. You can't call a line infinite if you've found one end of it.
The article (not the original scientific one, but the popular re-hash) is confusing topology and geometry. Geometry - which is all that the statement that the Universe is flat or open measures - is a purely local quantity in General Relativity. That is, it doesn't tell you anything about the overall size of the Universe. It is possible for something to be finite yet flat or open -- an example of the former is a torus (a donut). The local geometry of a torus is actually flat -- it's only when you look at the whole object you realize that it is finite (if you think a torus is curved, you aren't using the proper differential geometry definition of curvature, which is what is relevant here because it is what General Relativity is built on). So it is possible that the Universe is flat yet finite, and if you could go far enough in one direction you might circle around. There have been some experimental searches in the cosmic microwave background for signs that the Universe has an interesting topology, essentially by looking for the same pattern showing up on opposite sides of the sky. There were some claims that signatures had been found, but they were largely rebuffed, so the general consensus is that we don't have much evidence either way so far. It is true that the simplest case for a flat (or open) Universe is that it is infinite, but we don't have enough evidence to make that a very strong statement.
A slightly different question is whether space-time is infinite, which you can get in a spatially finite Universe as long as it lasts an infinite amount of time. Once upon a time, before the discovery of dark energy and the accelerating Universe, spatially flat or open implied temporally infinite. This is no longer the case, and hasn't been for 10 years or so. With dark energy, depending on its properties, you can have a spatially flat or open Universe that doesn't last forever. And we still know stunningly little about the properties of dark energy, although it would take a fairly complicated model to make a Universe that doesn't last forever.
And, yes, I am a cosmologist.
Make it 256 and say the other 255 universes are running on their own shard servers so we can't just walk over to them :)
-- Sig down
is there a name for the theory where the extent of the full universe is just so much bigger than our observable universe that there is plenty of room for other locally observable universes (presumably created by other big bangs), but they're just too far away for us to see?
(multiverse seems to be about extra dimensions and quantum effects. omniverse includes fictional items. so pls do not reply with those unless you think I have mischaracterized them.)
Physicists confirm: universe is a TARDIS
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
If the universe is spherical (regardless of whether it might also be hyperbolic, which is widely assumed to be the case), we should be able to see things that are farther than 14B light years merely due to the fact that they're closer along another trajectory, just as the apparently flat surface of the Earth ends up being continuous. This could be a really important discovery; if we can find something 14 billion light years away, we would either see a spectacular creation of space itself, or we would find something that revises our theories, including the possibility of confirming the spherical universe hypothesis (by seeing something disproportionately old). Either way, it would be quite exciting even outside the field of cosmology.
Of course, that's assuming that there is something to see; if the universe's initial expansion was anything but perfectly instantaneous, areas farther from the center would have been created proportionally later. Something 14B light years distant would therefore not be anywhere near as old as more central points, and therefore they wouldn't have had the appropriate time to emanate anything back towards us (or anywhere, for that matter). There is also the matter of the universe's hyperbolic shape, which has already helped scientists theorize that the universe is 78B light years wide (see the Wikipedia article cited in the /. summary) despite the observable 13.7B light year radius which gives a 15.8B light year visibility. It should also be noted that since we aren't in the center of the universe, we should be able to see farther in some directions than in others (though never more than 13.7B light years along its shortest path). Assuming that there are enough dark areas to make enough measurements, we could conceivably use this information to determine where the Big Bang actually began (the true center of the universe).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
When our cosmos expands, it's not expanding into some pre-existing bit of volume and taking it over, it's creating volume that didn't exist before.
To be fair, we don't actually know that. Our models tell us something like what you describe might be happening but to say our models of the universe are imperfect would be a gross understatement.
Sadly, I left my explanation of how an infinite universe works in my other pants, which I left at the Hilbert Hotel.
Beverly:
If there's nothing wrong with me...maybe there's something wrong with the universe!
Computer:
The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter.
On no! I hope it doesn't crush 'er.
According to new theories universally accepted by at least one crackpot scientist, the observed universe is as it exists in that moment, and so you cannot say anything about what exists beyond what is possible to observe (not counting what is unobservable due to optical resolution, sensitivity, etc). What lies beyond the observable is not a part of reality; essentially it does not exist.
Nowhere did the summary say that the observable universe is 14 billion light years ... radius, across or otherwise. It was just an example of why it's hard to observe the universe.
From TFA:
"They say that the curvature of the Universe is tightly constrained around 0. In other words, the most likely model is that the Universe is flat. A flat Universe would also be infinite and their calculations are consistent with this too. These show that the Universe is at least 250 times bigger than the Hubble volume. (The Hubble volume is similar to the size of the observable universe.)"
So...the Hubble volume is roughly 1/250th the size of infinity?
That's really profound, man!
...should be big enough for anybody!
G.
The cosmic background radiation we observe today has taken 13 Gigayears to get here. In all that time, the gas which emitted that radiation has not been running away from us at near lightspeed. Rather it has had random motion relative to it's neighborhood of around 0.001c., and the geometry of space has been expanding about 1000-fold since that time. That expansion of the geometry both stretches the wavelength of light from visible at 3000 Kelvin down to microwave at 3 Kelvin, and also adds to the volume of space both behind and ahead of a traveling photon. No part of space is stretching locally very fast, but the total stretching of space across the universe can exceed apparent lightspeed without violating relativity, because relativity operates locally, not globally across the universe.
Similarly, conservation of energy applies locally, but not to the universe as a whole. If dark energy is constant per volume of space (the theory of how it works), then the total energy of the universe increases as it grows. If that sounds weird, it is. Modern physics is just not intuitive to us humans that mostly deal with non-quantum, non-relativistic stuff on a daily basis.
I think we're well into the Fifth Level of Fatness here. Maybe even the Sixth:
http://comedians.jokes.com/gabriel-iglesias/videos/gabriel-iglesias--the-sixth-level-of-fat
The universe will always be larger than we can imagine..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
I'll not believe it until I see it!
the universe is estimated at 13.7 billion years old but the observable universe is estimated at ~93 billion light years diameter
at least 250 times larger than the observable universe means 250 x ~93 billion light years is the MINIMUM diameter of the universe
From Wikipedia
The diameter of the observable universe is estimated to be about 28 billion parsecs (93 billion light-years), putting the edge of the observable universe at about 46–47 billion light-years away
Misconceptions:
13.7 billion light-years. The age of the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years. While it is commonly understood that nothing can accelerate to velocities equal to or greater than light, it is a common misconception that the radius of the observable universe must therefore amount to only 13.7 billion light-years. This reasoning makes sense only if the universe is the flat spacetime of special relativity; in the real universe, spacetime is highly curved on cosmological scales, which means that 3-space (which is roughly flat) is expanding, as evidenced by Hubble's law. Distances obtained as the speed of light multiplied by a cosmological time interval have no direct physical significance.[18]
15.8 billion light-years. This is obtained in the same way as the 13.7 billion light year figure, but starting from an incorrect age of the universe which was reported in the popular press in mid-2006.[19][20][21] For an analysis of this claim and the paper that prompted it, see.[22]
27.4 billion light-years. This is a diameter obtained from the (incorrect) radius of 13.7 billion light-years.
Distances get weird on the universal scale so parsecs are used instead of light years as far as im aware
from wikipedia again (original i know...)
In 2009, a gamma ray burst, GRB 090423, was found to have a redshift of 8.2, which indicates that the collapsing star that caused it exploded when the universe was only 630 million years old.[46] The burst happened approximately 13 billion years ago,[47] so a distance of about 13 billion light years was widely quoted in the media (or sometimes a more precise figure of 13.035 billion light years),[46] though this would be the "light travel distance" (see Distance measures (cosmology)) rather than the "proper distance" used in both Hubble's law and in defining the size of the observable universe (cosmologist Ned Wright argues against the common use of light travel distance in astronomical press releases on this page, and at the bottom of the page offers online calculators that can be used to calculate the current proper distance to a distant object in a flat universe based on either the redshift z or the light travel time). The proper distance for a redshift of 8.2 would be about 9.2 Gpc
Also from TNG, Episode 4x05 "Remember Me":
Beverly: What is the primary mission of the Starship Enterprise?
Computer: To explore the galaxy.
Beverly: Do I have the necessary skills to complete that mission alone?
Computer: Negative.
Beverly: Then why am I the only crew-member? (the computer takes a moment to process and makes a strange noise) Aha, got you there.
Computer: That information is not available.
My top favorite ST:TNG episode was season 6x05, Schisms. It's too bad they didn't have time to bring back the subspace aliens (the writers were originally going to bring them back again to challenge the crew in a future episode, but apparently they either decided not to or didn't get around to it before the series completed its run).
Great quote; even better sig! (At least, *I* thought it was funny...)
If space itself is expanding, isn't everything within it also expanding? How big were protons/atoms/molecules (once they existed) shortly after the big bang, and are they larger now by the same proportions as the space they occupy? If everything (space and the stuff in it) is expanding at the same ratio, what does it mean to "expand"?
Luckily we were spared "does not compute", sparks and smoke.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Does this mean that we need more than 64 bit to address every atom in the universe?
Wow that's like... 2012349023375892114096869152745989630495777060409771447034133490 Planck lengths!
I'm serious T__T... I actually took the time to do the math. plus or minus a few quattuordecillion lengths.
The Big Bang is a religious fantasy just like Intelligent Design. It is based on a deeply held religious belief that the universe was created instantly by the command of some supernatural supreme being wrapped in a veil of science. It requires the belief in way to many fantastic unverified processes and concepts like inflation, dark matter and dark energy. A far simpler and verifiable explanation is one of a universe shaped by electromagnetic forces as well as gravitational forces (a misnomer for the perceived effect of time dilation due to volumetric electromagnetic energy density). The microwave background radiation is not a remnant of the big bang it is the logical result of Compton scattering off the ions and atoms present in interstellar space. This scattering is also responsible for the observed Red shift of objects farther away than nearer. A simple calculation based on the density of atoms in space shows that the light from the edge of the visible universe transverses approximately the same number of atoms that light from our own sun crosses when it enters our own atmosphere at sunrise and sunset. It makes the sun look red and it makes distant stars look red. If you look up on a clear day the sky is not dark it is lit by scattering. That is the same effect that creates the microwave background radiation. The vacuum of space is not a total vacuum so scattering takes place. It is a good vacuum so it takes great distances to accumulate scattering. The size of the universe is essentially infinite as is its age. The universe however is not static. Entropy is constantly reduced by black holes that spew out matter streams. The universe never dies it is constantly recycled.
If the ant has some form of vision, wouldn't that vision be locked within the physics of his 2-d universe? Wouldn't his vision follow the curvature of of his universe so that he could see all the way around the balloon? What would prevent this? If the physics of his vision uses 3-d, then he could see the edge of his 2-d universe or see outside into the 3-d universe.. If the physics of his vision only uses 2-d then he can see all the way around.
What 3-d measurements could you make to discover that your 3-d is contained within a 4-d space? What properties of the 4-d space do you know of to make measurements in 4-d?
nw
So does this make the age of the universe 3.3 trillion years old?
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
If the balloon inflates faster than the ant can walk, the ant can never walk all the way around the balloon. If unable to walk very far around the balloon, the ant could not even estimate its curvature.
In human (non-ant) terms, we would never see the same thing on opposite sides of the sky, or see our own backsides way out there in all directions.
The paper you want to read is Max Tegmark, "Parallel Universes," 2003. Available here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0302131v1
"Abstract: I survey physics theories involving parallel universes, which form a natural four-level hierarchy of multiverses allowing progressively greater diversity. Level I: A generic prediction of inflation is an infinite ergodic universe, which contains Hubble volumes realizing all initial conditions — including an identical copy of you about 101029 m away. Level II: In chaotic inflation, other thermalized regions may have different physical constants, dimensionality and particle content. Level III: In unitary quantum mechanics, other branches of the wavefunction add nothing qualitatively new, which is ironic given that this level has historically been the most controversial. Level IV: Other mathematical structures give different fundamental equations of physics. The key question is not whether parallel universes exist (Level I is the uncontroversial cosmological concordance model), but how many levels there are. I discuss how multiverse models can be falsified and argue that there is a severe “measure problem” that must be solved to make testable predictions at levels II-IV."
The universe is flat! If one would just keep going, they would simply just fall off!
250+ times bigger than the observable universe should be enough space for anyone.
B. Gates