Everything Totally Explained


Ask & we'll explain, totally!
Observable universe
Totally Explained


  NEW! All the latest news in the worlds of computer gaming, entertainment, the environment,  
finance, health, politics, science, stocks & shares, technology and much, much, more.  


View this entry using RSS

Everything about Observable Universe totally explained

In Big Bang cosmology, the observable universe is the region of space bounded by a sphere, centered on the observer, that's small enough that we might observe objects in it, for example there has been sufficient time for a signal emitted from the object at any time after the Big Bang, and moving at the speed of light, to have reached the observer by the present time. Every position has its own observable universe which may or may not overlap with the one centered around the Earth.
   The word observable used in this sense has nothing to do with whether modern technology actually permits us to detect radiation from an object in this region. It simply means that it's possible in principle for light or other radiation from the object to reach an observer on earth. In practice, we can only observe objects as far as the surface of last scattering, before which the universe was opaque to photons. However, it may be possible to infer information from before this time through the detection of gravitational waves which also move at the speed of light.

The universe versus the observable universe

Both popular and professional research articles in cosmology often use the term "universe" to mean "observable universe". This can be justified on the grounds that we can never know anything by direct experimentation about any part of the universe that's causally disconnected from us, although many credible theories, such as cosmic inflation require a universe much larger than the observable universe. No evidence exists to suggest that the boundary of the observable universe corresponds precisely to the physical boundary of the universe (if such a boundary exists); this is exceedingly unlikely in that it would imply that Earth is exactly at the center of the universe, in violation of the cosmological principle. It is likely that the galaxies within our visible universe represent only a minuscule fraction of the galaxies in the universe.
   It is also possible that the universe is smaller than the observable universe. In this case, what we take to be very distant galaxies may actually be duplicate images of nearby galaxies, formed by light that has circumnavigated the universe. It is difficult to test this hypothesis experimentally because different images of a galaxy would show different eras in its history, and consequently might appear quite different. A 2004 paper claims to establish a lower bound of 24 gigaparsecs (78 billion light-years) on the diameter of the universe, based on matching-circle analysis of the WMAP data.

Size

The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the visible universe (also called cosmic light horizon) is about 14 billion parsecs (46 billion light-years) in any direction. This defines a lower limit on the comoving radius of the observable universe, although as noted in the introduction, it's expected that the visible universe is somewhat smaller than the observable universe since we only see light from the cosmic microwave background radiation that was emitted after the time of, giving us the spherical surface of last scattering (gravitational waves could theoretically allow us to observe events that occurred earlier than the time of recombination, from regions of space outside this sphere). The visible universe is thus a sphere with a diameter of about 28 billion parsecs (about 92 billion light-years). Since space is roughly flat, this size corresponds to a comoving volume of about frac.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Observable Universe'.


External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

    <a href="http://observable_universe.totallyexplained.com">Observable universe Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
   As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.



Copyright © 2007-8 totallyexplained.com | Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License | Site Map
This article contains text from the Wikipedia article Observable universe (History) and is released under the GFDL | RSS Version