Brace Yourselves
Early next week the site layout will be changing. Voting will be down, but should eventually be restored and all the other usual features will be there. Aside from the new look of things you’ll still be getting all the usual updates and content.
That just told me what I already knew. That I am the biggest deal in the universe. I’M ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX, BABY!!!!
And people wonder why so many think aliens have to exist…
in the words of Hank Green, “No edge!”
Oh won’t you be in nerdfighter like with me?
I demand a videogame of ultimate space and time travelling
I feel really big now.
Also, how can the universe just.. stop? Our existence in time and space? It doesn’t make sense. My mind has burned. I’ll just put the ashes in a box.
According to the big bang -theory the universe has exploded/erupted from a point with limited extension in space. (It no longer has to be a mathematical point for the theory to hold, a finite density above a certain level and vice-verse a small enough extension in space is enough.). Since the traveling speed of anything cannot be higher than the speed of light (at least for now this statement stays true.) our universe as we perceive it has no effect on the surrounding further away than the distance something traveling at the speed of light could have traveled since it started at the big bang. Theoretically there probably could be something further away, our universe simply hasn’t reached it. Yet..
In conclusion my perception is that it doesn’t stop, it’s just that we have no means of reaching any further.
Treat for anyone reading this far, if you are traveling at the speed of light your perception is that you arrive instantly, deep-freezing is SO 2999
and for you who even read this far, I’m a dude.
I think it might refer to how far light has traveled since the universe began
What do you mean by “just stop”? Nothing is stopping. Even when we die our body and the energy and matter we consume has existed on the Earth for millions of years and will continue to exist. After you die, your body will be consumed by the Earth and atmosphere, and will be recycled into something new.
When our star dies, it will burst open and the matter will be flung into the void. It will become new planets around a new star somewhere else. Perhaps the remains of our star will become a part of another life form on another planet around a different star.
It is a bit of a mind-blow. There’s quite a few basic concepts you have to understand before you can understand why the observable universe is not the same size as the total theoretical universe.
First off, the observable universe is a spherical volume (a ball, or a bubble) centered on the observer, that has a radius of 93 billion light years. Why 93 billion light years? Because that’s the farthest distance, in principle, that light or other signals from an object that far away to reach an observer on Earth. Any further away and the light cannot reach us. To understand why that is, you need to understand the underlying physics, and to understand that you need to understand how the universe was formed.
The 93 billion year figure comes a combination of the understanding of the age of the universe, the rate of the expansion of the universe, Special Relativity, Hubble’s Law and the measurable distance of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
Now, we can calculate that the universe is roughly 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years old. Before the universe was 360,000 years old, it was effectively opaque, and no light could propagate very far without being reabsorbed. After this point, photons decoupled from matter in the universe, moving freely through the universe without interacting with matter, and constitute what we observe today as cosmic microwave background radiation (the CMBR). We can measure how distant the CMBR is by measuring it’s redshift. And it turns out to be 93 billion light years distant.
So, why is the light we see at the cosmic horizon apparently older than the big bang? Because the universe is expanding, that’s why. To be precise, it’s expanding at 74.2 ±3.6 kilometers/second/megaparsec. That means for every megaparsec (about 3 million light years) you go out, the universe is expanding 74.2 km/sec faster. So a galaxy 10 Mpc away would be moving away from us at 742 km/sec. And a galaxy 100 Mpc away would be moving away at 7420 km/sec. And so on. If you do the math, you find out that anything more than 93 billion light years away from us is actually moving away from us faster than the speed of light. How can that be, you ask? Isn’t it impossible for anything to have a velocity faster than light? This is where you need to understand Special Relativity and Hubble’s Law. I won’t bother trying to explain those concepts here, they’re far to involved. All you need to know is that it’s space itself that is expanding. That is, the dimensional framework of interstellar space/time is getting larger, and it is this that is making distant objects move away not only from us, but from each other.
This video was pretty awesome in general, but what I would’ve done for the return to Earth was zoom straight into it in 10 seconds flat.
That would be like 20% cooler
Dude, Really? In the SCIENCE section?!?!
…
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For sure. I also wanted to see it zoom in further, to the atomic level and the smallest known “universe”.
It just dawned on me what the words “Insignificant” and “Microscopic” can really mean. Especially compared to what we conceive as Important or Large. Our planet, billions of times bigger than us, compared to the sun, galaxy, and known Universe. Earth is everything, and nothing. But nothing is still something, even if it can’t be seen. Our place here may never truly be known.
Farts.
htwins.net/scale2/
That is the coolest thing I have ever seen.
Can’t tell if trolling or just very high…
this makes feel very unlucky to have been born in this planet