Universe creation and size of universe question?

Question

If the big bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, and the observable universe is about 46.5 billion light years, does that mean the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light? 46.5 is greater than 13.7. I understand one is measured in distance and the other is measured in time, but I'm still confused. Please help. Thanks.

I read this from wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

Answer 1

Time and space is probably measured differently that far out in the universe. For all we know Light probably travel faster on the other side of the universe. But no one knows. All we have are theories :)

Astronomy is facsinating :)

Answer 2

Why don't you keep on reading the rest of the article. It explains the anser to your question. Below is the answer I copied and pasted from the soure you mentioned:

13.7 billion light-years. The age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years. While it is commonly understood that nothing travels faster than light, it is a common misconception that the radius of the observable universe must therefore amount to only 13.7 billion light-years. This reasoning might make sense if we lived in the flat spacetime of special relativity, but in the real universe, spacetime is highly curved at cosmological scales by virtue of the Hubble expansion (though space is roughly flat). Distances obtained as the speed of light times a cosmological time interval have no direct physical significance. [5]

Answer 3

It's not expanding faster than light now, but it was at one point. That was right after the big bang and is known as 'inflation'. Plus, remember, it's 13.7 in both directions, so that would actually make it 27.4 billion ly across.

Answer 4

No, the speed of light in both directions? Well all directions actually but if you imagine two going in the opposite direction you'll see that lightspeed isnt being violated.

HOWEVER. Space itself IS accelerating at faster than the speed of life and many astrophysicists believe that the actual universe the visible universe is in is trillions of times bigger. Not sure where you got your figures from but I haven't seen any respectable sources claiming that the visible universe is larger than the speed of light would give us. I'll go look at that article.

OK, this is the crunch in the article 'The figures quoted above are distances now (in cosmological time), not distances at the time the light was emitted'. So the Universe has continued to expand - since the light reaching us from the most distant parts left their sources. Get it?

Answer 5

Ah! Welcome to the elephant in the room of the Big Bang Theory!

The entire Big Bang Theory is based on the observable effect of the tendency of light waves to shift towards the lower frequencies the further away the object is. This has been attributed to doppler shift from motion, which implies that farther objects are moving away from us, with the speed proportional to their distance. The problem with this is that it's an assumption that's not provable. We simply have no idea how light behaves over vast distances.

Obler's paradox says that if the universe was truly infinite, the sky would be white with stars, that no matter what vector you look at, there would be a star. Yet when the radiotelescopes demonstrated this in the case of what they term "background radiation", it's passed off as an echo of the Big Bang.

I ain't saying it's wrong, but I ain't sayin' it's right either. There are too many careers that would be ruined if the Big Bang Theory is not correct, so to suggest it needs another look at the fundamental assumptions gets you shouted down in short order in scientific circles.

Answer 6

All organic issues are constrained in length. Even the form of atoms in the universe is a finite huge type. which does not propose the universe can not amplify, yet merely skill it could by no skill grow to be limitless in length.