My teacher (history) told me that they've already discovered how big the

M

melissamusic

New member
end of the universe is? My teacher told me that they've discovered how big the universe is. But i don't quite understand. Is it possible to find the end of the universe? My theory is that the universe is simply too big for humans to travel the end of it, like as if its infinity. And even if they did find the end of the universe, would their be some sort of invisible wall, or structure or anything that prevents humans from continuing forward.

Please answer honestly, i'm just curious. :)
 
She's wrong.cuz on the big bang theory everything is moving away and if the stars,planets,etc are moving away,they turn blue.if they are comming back they are red.well they can't find the end when human technology (a pod sent to outer space) is bearly getting past neptune and the pod is over like 30years.so i doubt its the end for it if it hasnt even gotten out of our galaxy
 
This is a prime example why you don't listen to people with humanities degrees!!!! Your teacher is completely wrong. As I'm sure you're aware the universe is expanding due to the big bang. However, what you may or may not know is that the stars/galaxies are not themselves moving, it is the space between them which is expanding. This is hard to visualise and the best anology I can come up with is to imagine a balloon. It's deflated and you draw some dots on it, you then blow it up. The dots move apart, even though the dots themselves aren't moving. This is exactly what happens in the big bang. We can prove this because just after the big bang there was lots of energy released in the form of gamma rays, these have now been stretched to be microwaves (longer wavelength) due to the expansion of space itself. This phoenomina is known as cosmic background radiation - its the same stuff responsible for the grey pixels on your T.V when its not properly tuned it.
Anyway back to your question. Its difficult to try and explain without a diagram but I can try. Imagine a galaxy is x metres away from us. At x metres space is expanding at a constant rate, meaning this galaxy is moving away from us with a speed of v m/s. If we now look at another galaxy at 2x metres away it will be receeding with a speed of 2v. 3x is 3v and so on. This process can continue indefinately until the edge of the observable universe. At this point the speed of recession v, becomes so large that its actually greater than the speed of light. This means light from beyond this point will not reach our eyes and so we cannot see it because nothing, besides recession can travel faster than the speed of light. Objects beyond this point are beyond the observable universe. This is why when you look up in the night sky there are a finite amount of stars. There are far more stars in the sky, its just we can't see them since the light from them will never reach us. This again is proof for the big bang since if recession wasn't occuring then the sky would just be white with light and would have no gaps since the light from every single star, ANYWHERE in the universe would reach us. This is ofcourse nonsense. In summary, we can NEVER go beyond the edge of the observable universe.

Interesting fact: eventually (a LONG time into the future) the sun will be beyond our observable universe and we won't be able to see it!

Hope this answered your question. Feel free to show it to your teacher!
 
That's probably why he's teaching history not astronomy.

There is a calculated edge of the visible universe based on the limitations of the speed of light, there is no way to see beyond this point as the light even from the earliest moments of the formation of the universe simply won't have reached us yet.

As for travel, the furthest humans have got is our moon, the furthest unmanned space probes have got is the boundaries of our solar system. That is to say if our solar system was Britain and the nearest star was the USA, humans have managed to travel from Birmingham to Coventry and the furthest space probe has made it as far as the beach and is now in sight of the ocean. That's how little of space we have explored.

We can see a lot more than we have explored though due to the images we can see with telescopes looking in pretty much every frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Cosmologists believe there is a lot more to the universe than what we can see.

If you'd like to see more about the scale of the universe check this site:

http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/
 
Honestly, your teacher was lying. By far humans have not yet discovered the border of the universe, and I doubt if we can. The universe is so large that it will take billions of years even for light to travel from one end to the other, assuming it has ends. Thus by the time we receive any returning light sent by our ancestors from the Earth, it is most likely that humanity no longer exists.
 
Back
Top