how big is our universe ?

Question

the vastness of the universe is infinite ,,,, and its out of focus,
this question is similar to asking ,,, how much power a god has.......wat do u think.. please send your opinion

Answer 1

Depends on who you talk to. The expansionist contractionist people say it's only as big as the Gamma Rays from the Bang, which is like 15 billion light years times what, 100 billion miles per year approximatley.

Answer 2

The universe is a big, big place. But how big? And how do we know?

Throughout history, humans have used a variety of techniques and methods to help them answer the questions 'How far?' and 'How big?' Generations of explorers have looked deeper and deeper into the vast expanse of the universe. And the journey continues today, as new methods are used, and new discoveries are made. (To learn more about distance, visit How Big is Our Universe.)

In the third century B.C., Aristarchus of Samos asked the question 'How far away is the Moon?' He was able to measure the distance by looking at the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse.

It was Edmund Halley, famous for predicting the return of the comet that bears his name, who three centuries ago found a way to measure the distance to the Sun and to the planet Venus. He knew that the planet Venus would very rarely, every 121 years, pass directly between the Earth and the Sun. The apparent position of the planet, relative to the disk of the Sun behind it, is shifted depending on where you are on Earth. And how different that shift is depends on the distance from both Venus and the Sun to the Earth. This rare event, the transit of Venus, occurred again quite recently, June 8, 2004.

It was knowing this fundamental distance from the Earth to the Sun that helped us find the true scale of the entire Solar system for the first time.


When we leave the solar system, we find our star and its planets are just one small part of the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is a huge city of stars, so big that even at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years to travel across it. All the stars in the night sky, including our Sun, are just some of the residents of this galaxy, along with millions of other stars too faint to be seen.

The further away a star is, the fainter it looks. Astronomers use this as a clue to figure out the distance to stars that are very far away. But how do you know if the star really is far away, or just not very bright to begin with? This problem was solved in 1908 when Henrietta Leavitt discovered a way to tell the 'wattage' of certain stars that changed their pulse rate linked to their wattage. This allowed their distances to be measured all the way across the Milky Way.




Beyond our own galaxy lies a vast expanse of galaxies. The deeper we see into space, the more galaxies we discover. There are billions of galaxies, the most distant of which are so far away that the light arriving from them on Earth today set out from the galaxies billions of years ago. So we see them not as they are today, but as they looked long before there was any life on Earth.

Finding the distance to these very distant galaxies is challenging, but astronomers can do so by watching for incredibly bright exploding stars called supernovae. Some types of exploding stars have a known brightness - wattage - so we can figure out how far they are by measuring how bright they appear to us, and therefore how far away it is to their home galaxy.


So how big is the universe? No one knows if the universe is infinitely large, or even if ours is the only universe that exists. And other parts of the universe, very far away, might be quite different from the universe closer to home. Future NASA missions will continue to search for clues to the ultimate size and scale of our cosmic home.

Answer 3

Few astronomers talk about the 'size' of the universe. To talk about the size of anything you've automatically implied that it has an edge or boundary of some kind, and from that it follows that there must be some 'thing' beyond that boundary. At this point in our understanding of the laws of the universe we have no way of even beginning to talk about some 'thing' other than our own universe. Lots and lots of speculation (..parallel universes, multiple universes born in some "mother" universe, other universes in other dimensions, etc.,.) but there's not a single shred of hard evidence that any of these notions are valid.

However, astronomers have set the age of the universe at about 13.7-billion years.

Answer 4

We can, with our most powerful telescopes, see only to about 14 billion years ago. Therefore, ~14 billion years times ~186,000 miles per second. Calculate that, and you'll see how big the universe is. (But it's getting bigger)

Answer 5

I remember hearing that our universe has noe edge and no center. This is something hard to comprehend. A universe with no definable shape in essence would have no definable size.

Answer 6

I believe the most accurate count of the estimated stars alone in our universe is 70-sextillion or 70,000,000,000,000,000,000. I'm also sure, what ever is beyond that is even more uncomprehendable.