• Question: how big is space, does it ever come to a stop?

    Asked by anon-220209 on 10 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Kate Timms

      Kate Timms answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      That’s a great question! I don’t think we’ll every really know. It’s so big that concepts like miles don’t really apply to it. It just goes on and on forever and some people think it’s constantly expanding!

    • Photo: Kaitlin Wade

      Kaitlin Wade answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      That’s an awesome question. Space is incomprehensibly huge. Science suggests that the Universe is constantly expanding but into what!? I have no idea! I don’t think anyone knows really! Plus it’s something that is really difficult for us (and definitely me!) to picture or comprehend.

    • Photo: Matthew Bareford

      Matthew Bareford answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      Space is by definition infinite…. It is so large, we cannot really measure it. Scientists say that it is constantly expanding, but it could also be that we just keep being able to see further and further into it…

    • Photo: David Wilson

      David Wilson answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” (yup, that’s a Douglas Adams quote).
      I don’t know how big space is, nobody does know as it’s still supposedly expanding. However, we do know that the observable universe, the farthest we can see is about 93 billion light years in diameter. A light year is the distance light travels in on earth year, it’s 9.4607 × 10^12 km (nearly 6 million million miles). Which doesn’t really help in comprehending the vastness of space.

    • Photo: Rebecca Moon

      Rebecca Moon answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      Massive. I’m going to put my hand up and say I’m not a space expert I’m afraid. Would be interested to know the answer too.

    • Photo: Thiloka Ratnaike

      Thiloka Ratnaike answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      Infinitely big I believe. The word inifinite doesn’t mean much to me apart from that my mind cannot comprehend such ‘bigness’!!

    • Photo: Marianne King

      Marianne King answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      The universe is expanding I believe! So it’s constantly getting bigger. But trying to imagine what it then might be expanding into gives me a headache. There are theories about whether space will expand forever or whether one day we will have a ‘big crunch’ where it all collapses and then it’ll be infinitely small! Space upsets me a bit because it has so many unimaginable concepts. But I love reading about it.

    • Photo: Nina Rzechorzek

      Nina Rzechorzek answered on 10 Jun 2019:


      Fantastic question – know one knows, but that doesn’t make the question impossible to answer in the future. Maybe you could be the person to answer it? That would almost certainly get a Nobel Prize. Some believe space is infinite; most data points to its ever-expanding nature. But if it does stop somewhere, what’s at the edge? Some of these fundamental questions are still wide open. One estimate is that the whole Universe is roughly 250 times as large as the observable Universe. This touches on an important concept in science – we can only test what we can measure and we can only measure what we can observe. So what about the stuff we can’t observe or measure? And what if ‘observing’ something in itself changes the thing we are trying to measure? These sorts of questions always make my head hurt, but they are actually essential to how we interpret data. Sometimes our eyes and brains play tricks on us and we are all subject to bias, so we have to be super careful about how we test ideas. Typically, proving a hypothesis via multiple different methods is a powerful way to give us greater confidence that what we have found is true.

      You can find out more info related to your question here:
      http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160610-it-took-centuries-but-we-now-know-the-size-of-the-universe

    • Photo: Shobhana Nagraj

      Shobhana Nagraj answered on 11 Jun 2019:


      Hi @ameliac! This is a really interesting question.. Space is huge and measured in light years as the distances are so vast – we can only measure as far as we can see, but the likelihood is space goes on further than we currently know. You can find out more about how big our universe is from a NASA blog here: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/blog/1563/our-milky-way-galaxy-how-big-is-space/
      This also explains what a light year is to give you some idea of distances of the earth in relation to other planets and stars!
      There are also some good PDFs of information on this at the end of this NASA blog: https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/5-8/features/F_How_Big_is_Our_Universe.html
      They currently think that the milky way is probably between 100,000 and 150,000 light years across, and the observable Universe is about 93 billion light years in diameter. I hope this helps!

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