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 giga
parsecs (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
.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Observable Universe'.
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