Cosmos At Least 250x Bigger Than Visible Universe, Say Cosmologists

By Ben on February 2, 2011 at 3:20 am | In Blog Posts | No Comments

boy, do I feel ‘small’ now.
–Ben

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Cosmos At Least 250x Bigger Than Visible Universe, Say Cosmologists

When we look out into the Universe, the stuff we can see must be close enough for light to have reached us since the Universe began. The universe is about 14 billion years old, so at first glance it’s easy to think that we cannot see things more than 14 billion light years away.

That’s not quite right, however. Because the Universe is expanding, the most distant visible things are much further away than that. In fact, the photons in the cosmic microwave background have travelled a cool 45 billion light years to get here. That makes the visible universe some 90 billion light years across…

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26333/