This was unexpected

[plutherus]

Well, unexpected to me, anyway. I'm sure there're some physicists who'd already guessed that this might be the case.

Turns out the Universe, although it's only 13.7 billion years old, is 156 billion light-years wide!

Now, you may ask, how is that possible? I mean, if it's only 13.7 billion years old, and all started from a central, nearly infinitely-dense point, shouldn't it be at most 27.4 billion light years across?

Well, it turns out that the universe is expanding. And expanding doesn't mean that everything is just getting further away from everything else, it means that space-time itself is actually stretching. From the article:

Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."

Weird, huh?

They also invalidated my favorite theory, which was a universe small enough that light could wrap all the way around it, so somewhere out there among the faint blue galaxies is the Milky Way - nearly unrecognizable after billions of light years of blueshifting and gravitational lensing.

Comments

[31seel.livejournal.com]

They should hav eused my analogy that it is like throwing a ball from the back of the car to the front while driving. It was in the paper I presented on the topic. Neil bettered not have removed my name as well!

I was sort of bummed when the possibility of my "remote past viewer" was destroyed. I'll start working on the equations again, I already have the packaging for the Jesus Porn.