How big is the universe (In Numbers)
Lets start off by saying IT IS STILL EXPENDING, and to top that off, the rate of expansion is actually increasing, it is one of the universe’s greatest unsolved mysteries. The short answer to this age old question would be that the universe is, take a deep breath… seventy-nine sextillion, nine hundred twenty-one quintillion, seventy quadrillion, seven hundred eighty-seven trillion, and six hundred billion miles. But could it be that simple? well no, far from it.
how Big Is The Universe (What’s the catch)
The number 13.4 billion light years merely refers to the visible universe, the universe which we are able to view. The problem in figuring out exactly how big the universe is, is that we are limited by the laws of physics themselves, to be more specific, the physics of how light travels through space.
It is a well known and accepted theory that the universe started from a small singularity and in a faction of a fraction of a second it exploded into what we know as the universe, the big bang theory that is, when this “bang” occurred, two things started moving at an incredible speed, light (photon particles), and space it self. Light is considered to be the universal speed limit, nothing can or does move faster… except for space it self, the expansion rate of the space or size of the universe is much faster than light, because of this little rule, we can only see as far out into space as light managed to travel to.
How Big Is The Universe (Put Into Prospective)
- Distance between the earth and the sun: 94 million miles, it would take 17 years to fly there in a
commercial jet.
- Size of our solar system: approximately 2,815,000,000 miles across.
- Number of stars (suns, some with planets in orbit) in our Galaxy: approximately 100 billion (100,000,000,000)
- Number of Galaxies in the visible universe: Approximately 125 billion.
How Big Is The Universe (Bonus Fact)
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image is one of the most amazing images taken in human history. Over the course of nearly 4 months, this $1.5 billion of human ingenuity gathered light from the farthest reaches of space, the telescope focused on a 0.0016 Inches Squared area of the night sky and what it found was incredibly shocking to say the least, the image seen below contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, at about 100 billion stars per galaxy, that is a breathtakingly large number of suns in such a small patch in the sky.
