Weird little questions for this here group

[eccoblackfin]

How large is the known universe? Or, put in a different light, do 'we' have any clue as to where the universal center might be, or what it looks like in theory or otherwise? Finally, what's the object, be it galaxy, star, restaurant, etc., furthest away from us?

Comments

[cassiopeia13]

Latest picture of the known universe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:WMAP_2008.png Sorry it's on the Wiki, but that was the only one I could find. It's accurate though.

Here's the wiki on the other questions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

[eccoblackfin]

Woah, Wiki has everything..
What exactly is that picture? Is it like every known object, or what?

[timeprojectile]

The one that person posted? It's the cosmic microwave background. The edge of the known Universe.

Oh wait, I just told you the universe doesn't have an edge, didn't I? Well, objectively it doesn't have an edge, but as far as the universe that we are capable of knowing goes, the center is us and the edge is what we see as the cosmic microwave background. But take a point on the cosmic microwave background, which today would be a galaxy like ours (but we see it as it was almost 14 billion years ago, before it was a galaxy), and they would see US as the cosmic microwave background at the edge of THEIR "known universe" and they would be the "center."

[cassiopeia13]

It's pretty cool isn't it? Having a picture of the "known" universe. First time I saw that I was like WHOA! Puts a whole new perspective on things. It would be interesting if one could teleport to the edge and then take a new picture how much farther it would go. What would be beyond it, would there be ANYTHING beyond it...

[timeprojectile]

The "known universe" is, sort of, about 14 billion light years in radius, which would mean 28 billion in diameter. We can only see the distance the light has been able to travel in the 14 billion years since (this episode of?) the Universe began. But space has expanded since the light set out from these galaxies, so technically I think that would make them farther away today than what their light-travel time would infer. And furthermore, we think the Universe is even larger still, beyond what we can ever see due to the Universe's finite age and increasing expansion, because the best way we have to explain why the cosmic microwave background looks more or less the same even on opposite sides of the sky (which are twice as far away from one another as light has had time to travel) is that it was all once in contact with each other long ago, but an ultra-powerful expansion of space immeasurable fractions of a second after the Big Bang, known as Inflation, blew these similar regions apart

[eccoblackfin]

Thanks, that answered a lot of questions. It also raised a hell of a lot more though.

Ah, don't you just love astronomy?

[timeprojectile]

That's what science always does. Raise more questions than it answers. Which can be frustrating if you're in one of those moods when you want answers...but wonderful if you're in one of those moods where you want to feel like you're part of something magical and mysterious and beautiful.

[eccoblackfin]

So, with that theory/analogy, we're basicaly just skimming along the surface of a bubble? Does that mean that sometime in the next trillion years or so we'll do a full circle and be smashed together in a new big bang?
Or maybe, we're already being pulled into the next one, the so-called 'dark flow', by the rest of the universe that we don't know about yet o.O

[rogerdr]

We can only see as far as light has traveled since the universe became transparent to light, but it may be infinitely larger than we can ever see. Since to look out is to look back in time, I'd say that you should try to live as long as possible and find out just how big it is, but since it's also expanding, you will probably see less of it in times to come rather than more, so...let 13.7 billion light years be enough. Isn't that enough?

[tomobiki_yuu]

based on infra-red, and other non visible means of seeing out there, what we see is a fraction of what may be out there.