• Question: where is the end of the universe

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      Asked by anon-285896 on 25 Mar 2021.
      • Photo: Jesko Koehnke

        Jesko Koehnke answered on 4 Mar 2021:


        Right, not a physicist, so someone correct me if I am wrong. And it is a very, very advanced question that I like.
        We don’t know if the universe has an edge. We know the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and that implies an edge using our everyday concept of things. But whether that is actually true for the universe is something we have yet to figure out.
        There is certainly an edge to the observable universe, because it takes light time to travel to us. So the age of the universe determines how “far” we can see, and that is about 14 billion light years (remember, this special kind of year is actually a distance) in each direction.
        If you are interested in this sort of thing I highly recommend Stephen Hawking’s “A brief history of time”, which was a very enjoyable read.

      • Photo: Martin McCoustra

        Martin McCoustra answered on 4 Mar 2021:


        Thanks a good question… The Universe is some 13.5 billion years old. That would put the edge of the Universe some 13.5 billion light years from Earth. One light year is 5,879,000,000,000 miles. So we are talking 13.5 times that distance. That’s a long way!

      • Photo: Matt Foulkes

        Matt Foulkes answered on 4 Mar 2021:


        Good question! In all honesty, I don’t think I know! I’m not sure if it actually does have a definite, still edge. I can tell you that if it does have an end, it’s very very VERY far away! So far away, I think it would be difficult to fully imagine just how far that really is!

      • Photo: Nikita King

        Nikita King answered on 5 Mar 2021:


        There is no end to the Universe, that we know of at the moment, and it seems to be expanding at a faster rate than it was!

      • Photo: Ane Valera

        Ane Valera answered on 5 Mar 2021:


        There are scientist more prepared to answer this question that I am, but it’s well known that Universe is expanding all the time! So it’s very hard to say where that end is, but a lot of people say it’s infinite!

      • Photo: Ben Esse

        Ben Esse answered on 10 Mar 2021:


        That is a big question in cosmology! It depends on the “shape” of the universe, which according to current measurements is flat. In that case the Universe would be infinite, like an endless sheet of paper, so wouldn’t really have an end. But we can only see so much of it due to the speed of light. The Universe came into being with the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, so we can only see a bubble that is roughly 14 billion light years distant from us. Beyond that, who knows…

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