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So if there is an edge to the universe, it's so far away Earthlings can't see it, and never will. Mack noted that assuming inflation happened, the universe is actually 10 23 times bigger than the 46 billion light-years humans can see. Whole regions of space will never be observable from Earth for that reason. For a brief fraction of a second after the Big Bang, there was a period of accelerated expansion called inflation, during which the universe grew at a much faster pace than it is growing now. That's because the distances between objects in the universe keep getting bigger at a rate that's faster than the light beams can get to Earth.Īnd on top of that, the rate of expansion has not been uniform.

Anything outside of that radius of 46 billion light-years is not visible to Earthlings, and it never will be. But that still sets a limit on the size of the universe humans can see, called the observable universe. The actual size of the observable universe is 46 billion light-years in any direction, even though the universe began only 13.8 billion years ago, Mack said. So any aliens in the galaxies that humans see would all come to the same conclusion that Earthlings do: Everything else is moving away in all directions, and the local galaxy is at rest.īecause space is expanding, it's possible for the galaxies to appear as if they are moving faster than light, without violating relativity - which says that nothing can go faster than light in a vacuum. That's because galaxies aren't moving away from each other through space - it's space itself that is getting bigger. That is, the concentration of matter in the universe is decreasing as the universe expands, she said. Katie Mack, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told Live Science that it might be more useful to think of the universe as getting less dense, rather than expanding. By definition, the universe contains everything, so there is no 'outside.' Physicist Stephen Hawking has often said that the whole question makes no sense, because if the universe came from nothing and brought everything into existence, then asking what lies beyond the universe is like asking what is north of the North Pole. The problem is that this doesn't apply to the universe. However, balloons, when blown up, are expanding into a three-dimensional space. But no matter where the ant skittered, the speed at which those objects were receding would follow the same relations - if the ant came up with an equation describing how fast the farthest objects were receding, it would work the same way anywhere on the balloon's surface. And the greater the distance between the ant and some object, the faster that object would be receding. Using the balloon analogy again, if one were to add more air to the balloon, the ant would observe other things on the balloon's surface getting farther away. Ballooning universeīut how can the universe be expanding if there is no end or edge to it? The universe is a three-dimensional version of the balloon's skin.

In addition, there's no 'center,' so there's no preferred point on the balloon's spherical surface. So even though the surface of a balloon is a finite number of square units, there's no edge to it, no boundary (since you can go forever in any one direction). An ant on such a surface can walk in any direction and it would look like the surface was 'unbounded' - that is, the ant might come back to where it started but there would be no end to the journey. One analogy often used to describe this edgeless universe is the surface of a balloon. The implication though, is that there is no 'edge' there is no place to go where the universe just ends and one could look in some direction and see what's beyond it. but averaged over big chunks of space, no place is really that different than anywhere else,' McNees told Live Science in an email 'There's lots of local variation - stars, galaxies, clusters, etc. The cosmological principle is, in part, a consequence of the idea that the laws of physics are the same everywhere.

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