what can be the other edge of universe ????

Answer 1

Things are not what they appear to be.
IE:way back when humans tought the earth was flat..
The "edges" might not be what we percieve as edges.

Maybe matter is, or black holes are!?
"One Planck time after the big bang, it appears that gravity separated from the other fundamental forces."

-->http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time

Answer 2

Who knows? The edge is really just a radius of about 15 billion light years (one LY ~ 6 trillion miles). That marks how long the light from that edge has been traveling before it reached Earth. It's for this reason, they say the big bang happened about 15 billion years ago. That is, the oldest we can see, is 15 billion years ago. So that must have been when it all began.

So there really isn't an "other edge." There is just the one that lies 15 billion light years from us like the rim of a gigantic wheel..What lies beyond...who knows?

For example, if there was a faster than light inflation epoch, where the universe expanded faster than light just following the BB, what if that FTL expansion actually went longer than now presumed? [Seesource.] Then, in fact, there may be more universe, yet unseen because light has a limited velocity, on the other side of the edge.

Current speculation fixes the so-called density parameter, Omega (Ω), at just a very wee bit under 1.0. [See source.] This means our know universe is almst, but not quite, a flat universe. But it does have a bit of a curve; therefore, it does have a bit of a radius of curvature. What if, on the other side of the edge, there is the rest of the balloon's surface we know as the known universe?

Answer 3

There is no edge,

My personally held idea, and one that certainly was held by most scientists [although honestly it is a while since I have looked into astro-physics so the ideas might have changed by now] is that the universe is a hypersphere. This is a four dimensional sphere, and means that if you were to fire a rocket into space and it followed a straight line, it would eventually get back to where it started. Sounds nutty doesn't it? But here is a good analogy that might help you understand the concept:

Imagine you are two dimensional stick man walking on the surface of a balloon. All you know is the 2-D surface you exist on, but if you walk in a straight line you'll end up where you started. This fact also means that the centre doesn't exist, at least not for the stickman. The centre is inside the balloon, but for the stickman to understand this or even get there, he must fold himself through the third dimension, which is impossible for him. Imagine he has a house and walks to college, there is a certain distance between these places. Then someone blows into the balloon, the distance between these places has increased, but the places themselves haven't changed, or even moved in relation to the surface, the very space between them has expanded. This is one of the hardest things to understand, that even space is something.

If you can follow this analogy into our universe, the universe is essentially a three dimensional 'surface' wrapped over a four dimension object. Essentially the amount of matter you could fit in it is finite, however it is of infinite length since there are no actual boundaries. The edge of the universe does not exist.

Here is a good video about understanding higher dimensions and explains why some scientists think there has to be at least 10 [some think 11, although recently these theories have fallen slightly out of favour, the world of astrophysics and quantum mechanics changes extremely quickly].

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u4cftztc...

Answer 4

What is the shape of the Universe? Is it round like a ball, flat like a sheet of paper or doubly curved like a western saddle? This may seem like a pretty abstract question. Most people struggle just to make sense of how the words "shape" and "Universe" can end up in the same sentence. While it may seem like an abstract issue fit only for philosophers, to scientists and wooly-headed ex-hippies it is, in fact, the strange issue of "shape" which can determine the entire fate of the Universe.

Cosmology (the science of the Universe as a whole) is not an easy subject to wrap your mind around. It is worth the effort though. The issues are so mind boggling that it can become the intellectual equivalent of skydiving. Perhaps the hardest part of Cosmology is learning to imagine the Universe as one giant entity. The question that almost always rears its ugly head in dealing with cosmological questions is the nature of the Universe's edge. In dealing with Everything-ness it is natural to run head long into the problem of what, exactly, is Everything in? Does the Universe go on forever? If not is there some kind of giant brick wall at the edge of the Universe (imagine the graffiti opportunities). In asking these questions, a problem arises in the way most people imagine space itself. It's natural to imagine Space to be emptiness or nothingness, a kind of giant shoebox into which the contents of the Universe are poured. Nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. Space is not the empty stage on which the drama of the Universe is played. It is one of the leading actors.

Our modern ideas of space (and time) come from none other than Albert Einstein. The good Dr. Einstein's Theory of Relativity is a potent set of physics ideas that gives us a completely new view of the nature of space. It also turns out to be the principal piece of physics needed for cosmology. Einstein, in all his genius, recognized that Space was not just emptiness but had its own separate reality. Space and time are a kind of "fabric" of reality and like any fabric they can stretch, bend and even fold. Yes, this is a completely freaky idea but let us just accept for now and see where we can go with it in terms of cosmology.

One of the first things Einstein did after he finished his theory of relativity was start thinking about space, time and the Universe as a whole. He knew that all the beautiful equations he derived could describe the stretching of the entirety of space. Now that is certainly a wild idea. There are actually equations that can describe the stretching, the shape, of all space. After years of working on the problem, Einstein and other scientists found that this cosmological stretching of space and time would determine how the physics of the entire Universe plays out. To get a glimmer of how this works you have to go back to the beginning.

In the beginning there was the Big Bang, a cataclysmic explosion that initiated the expansion of all that is. I am not kidding about the "all" here. Space was part of the explosion too. The big bang was not an explosion into space; it was an explosion of space. There was no Universe outside the Big Bang then or now. When we talk about the expansion of the Universe we are talking about all the space that ever existed. That is why we have to give up the idea that there is an "edge" where space just runs out. There cannot be anything outside of the Universe's space. It is existence! That is all. Imagine the Universe to be the stretched rubber of an inflated balloon. As the balloon is blown up, space expands but there is no edge. "Ah", you say "what about the inside and outside of the balloon?" My answer is there is no such thing. Existence is the skin of the balloon. The inside and outside are "fictions" we use to visualize the whole picture but they are not real. In the real world there is no inside or outside of space and time.

The round balloon picture is okay because it gives your mind something to hold on to. Unfortunately the Universe can have shapes other than round. These are more difficult to imagine. The Universe's space could be flat or even saddle shaped. In the classic versions of cosmology there is a direct relation between these shapes and the eventual fate of the Universe. A round Universe eventually stops expanding and collapses into a "Big Crunch". Other shaped Universes never collapse and may go on expanding forever. "Shape" is destiny in cosmology. Even in the infinitely expanding Universes, however, the idea of an edge never comes into play because, once again, space is all there is.

If all this still bothers you, you are not alone. It still bothers me too and after years of working on it I am just starting to get used to the idea. What is really remarkable however is that we have gobs of experimental evidence which supports Einstein's ideas about space and time and Big Bang cosmology. This tells you something very important about the Universe. The key thing about Big Bang Cosmology and Einstein's Theory of Relativity is they are clear, rational mathematical pieces of physics. What they are not is easy to reconcile with our everyday experience. That is not however a problem. Our everyday experience is very limited. So all this goes to show a critical feature of the Universe: just because something seems weird doesn't mean it can't be true.

Dr. H