• Question: How big is space?

    Asked by dkxa6522 to Donna, Jo, Mark, Stuart, timcraggs on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Donna MacCallum

      Donna MacCallum answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Apparently infinitely large – and no-one know where the ends are (yet)

    • Photo: Joanna Buckley

      Joanna Buckley answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Oooh good one, dkxa6522!

      The edge of the observable universe is about 46.5 billion light-years away so to answer you question not particularly scientifically, it’s blummin’ massive 🙂

    • Photo: Mark Lancaster

      Mark Lancaster answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Tricky one – matter is distributed over about 300 billion light years ie if you could travel at the speed of light (which you can’t !) it’d take 300 billion years to get across and in that time it will have expanded further ! This is just the universe that contains matter BUT there is believed to be an invisible universe that is likely much,much bigger than we can never see or reach since it was created when the universe was expanding ( very, very briefly) quicker than the speed of light – the light that it is being emitted here (if it is) will never reach us….and so we’ve no idea how big this part of the universe is from measurements but we can make a guess from theory…

    • Photo: Tim Craggs

      Tim Craggs answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      VERY BIG!

      Apparently the currently most quoted figure for the radius of the universe is 78 million light years! That is 78 million times the distance that light travels in 1 year (1 light year is nearly 6 trillion miles) so it is pretty big!!

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