Epic Discovery: Our Colossal Universe -"250 Times Bigger than What We See"

pretty cool thread S&F allow me to throw this in:

laws-of-physics-may-change-across-the-universe
www.newscientist.com...


also another possibility actually, it's also my first post ever on ATS from a Doctor Who novel i was reminded of while reading this thread:
A Galaxies Cluster Older Than Possible! Scientists say

it's all the way on page 9 so i'll only post relevant snippet:

The Doctor took back the mug and stood it on the tables beside one of the laptops. ‘Ever heard of o-regions?’ Nesbitt shook his head. ‘You?’ he asked Lansing and Phillipps. Neither of them had. ‘Pity.’ The Doctor dipped his finger tentatively into the mug, snatching it away almost immediately. ‘An o-region is a part of space that is so far out, so isolated from everywhere else that its light hasn’t yet reached the rest of the universe. They’re big,’ he went on. ‘And being isolated, they are in effect mini-universes in their own right. If you can conceive of a mini-universe.’ ...‘There is an infinite number of o-regions, each developing Iike a mini-universe in its own way. And since you could, in theory – though I wouldn’t recommend that you try – work out every possible collision point and potential change in our own universe to date, that means that there’s only a finite number of possible histories. Huge, but finite.’ ‘And what does that mean?’ Nesbitt said. ‘It means that every possible version of history that you can imagine will occur.’ The Doctor grinned. ‘In fact, given the rather strange way that maths with infinity works, it means that every possible version of history will actually occur an infinite number of times.’

then just read my signature

the universe is probably a lot more complicated/mysterious than we think it is the more we investigate, the more weird it seems to become.
p.s.o-regions it's actually a real concept.
OP am saving this page there was another similar thread but yours has all the cool pics

Originally posted by Anodyne
reply to post by muzzleflash

 

No that is just the observable Universe, the Universe that we can detect / see. The actual Universe itself is much bigger than that, so we're not the centre of the Universe but ofcourse we are at the centre of our observable Universe. Ofcourse if you'd be living on a planet in the let's say the Andromeda galaxy, you would also be in the centre of the observable Universe seen rom that planet.
Because you will have the observable Universe seen from Andromeda.

edit on 2-2-2011 by Anodyne because: (no reason given)

edit on 2-2-2011 by Anodyne because: (no reason given)

Yes that's exactly what I was thinking, maybe I worded it wrong.

They are misinterpreting the observable universe as the 'actual universe'.

I agree it's obviously bigger than we are assuming based on these sensor readings.

With new technology I expect we will see even further than we can right now.

No that is just the observable Universe, the Universe that we can detect / see. The actual Universe itself is much bigger than that, so we're not the centre of the Universe but ofcourse we are at the centre of our observable Universe.

That's it in a nutshell.

It's like asking a goldfish to describe the Universe. He sees his bowl, and the foggy shapes outside of it, but he has no concept of there being a big world outside of that foggy house...yet it exists nonetheless...

I think we're in the same fishbowl of our "known" Universe....

I couldn't comprehend how big the universe was before, now it's 250 times bigger than I cant comprehend.

reply to post by XPLodER


Relativity. It looks like they got longer to get here than the age of the universe, but that's because the universe was moving in the opposite direction.

Deep stuff here. Sure does make my trip to the store seem like a lot less trouble.

reply to post by XPLodER


Here's the thing (and I'm not sure if you're suggesting this, but I know it gets suggested A LOT, even in scientific publications that really should know better, so I'm throwing it out there)...

The observation that the universe is expanding is not one drawn from any motion detected in distant objects - that is, we don't "see" the universe expanding. I don't know how many times I've seen redshift be attributed to proper motion of stars and galaxies caused by the expansion of the universe.
But this isn't how it works. The redshift we measure to determine the expansion of the universe is not caused by motion, it's a result of the fact that the expansion of the universe is a "metric" expansion - it's a stretching of space, itself, and not a true motion of the objects that space contains.
Let's say there's a star at with a measured redshift of 1.0 (meaning that its light, once it reaches us, has a wavelength twice that of when it was emitted). This is not due to the star moving, which would be a Doppler redshift. Instead, it's a Cosmological redshift, caused by the fact that space, itself, has stretched to be twice the size it was when the light was emitted, causing the wavelength to stretch accordingly. This is a very important distinction, and it's one that I rarely see made, even by those who really should know better.

What this means is that, an expanding "galaxy lens" would show an increase in redshift, which is not in accordance with observation. Expansion is determined by redshift, itself, not by an increasing redshift.

That being said, though, I do believe that gravitational lensing could be a reasonable alternate explanation of the observed redshift, if understood correctly, and sans the expanding lenses.

reply to post by XPLodER


amazing how did you fine that infomation shoking

reply to post by XPLodER


If you look at the first graphic as part of a "pie chart", you could get the impression of the big bang event being at it's center.

How do we know we are seeing this far back in our observable universe?

Once you consider my first statement, you must quickly become aware of the "expansion" from the big bang was
likely not in two but three deminsions.

Now you have a spherical universe and some where with in it is our observable universe.

If we can detect @90 billion light years of the overall volumn of this sphere, and we can not be at it's center, just how large and old could it truely be?

This could be like putting a ping pong ball inside a large beach ball.

The scale of this comparison could be in dispute, but the intent is for a visual reference.

Even if the universe stopped at some wall... what would be behind that.. and if it stops again whats behind that, and so....... There is no end.. it cant "end" even if it "ends" with a wall.. the wall would be endless and continue into Infinity.. witch make you wonder where all the material to build such thing would come from..

infinity is a word that science dont like... but I really dont see how the "space" could end.. even if it started to curve, what would happen if one continued to travel in a straight line..

reply to post by hdutton


Of course, given a "flat" universe, its size is infinite, as it would be if the density of the universe were less than critical (an "open" universe). A super-critical universe is the only one that's finite, so, if we're talking about a size, then this is the model we must be talking about. In that case, it's size has a lower limit, because a finite, "closed", universe wraps back on itself, leading to a horizon where we would start to see the same stars on either side of the sky. We don't see the same stars of either side of the sky, however, so this leaves two possibilities: either the universe is so large that the light from that duplicate horizon hasn't reached us yet, or the universe is flat and (effectively) infinite. The first of these gives a lower limit on the diameter of the universe of 156 billion light-years (see HERE)

And that's assuming a closed universe. Locally, the universe appears to be within a negligible margin of being measurably flat. Of course, the large-scale structure of the universe may still be closed, but, out to nearly 14 billion light-years, the universe is flat within experimental error.

Great post, thank you.

delete/double post: must be a sticking return tab on my abused lap top

Originally posted by korathin
reply to post by XPLodER

 

Anyone else feel some what skeptical when the mainstream answer is that: "it is flat". And how they use mysterious things, almost like sea monsters as proof that it is flat?

You will find it is infact circular, or at least, appears that way, and it will [appear] to be infinitely so: I am so engrossed in the relatively new idea of fractal geometry as opposed to the Euclidean approach that I am, currently, forced to the idea that mathematics not only holds the key to all our answers, but as the purest expression of thought, demonstrates so unequivocally that, 'that is' – for it cannot be any other way.

Nothing so describes the imperceptible as completely as does mathematics, & even space/time is curved. I imagine at some point we will look far enough into it as to see our own faces in it.

reply to post by CLPrime


I must admit to a limited amount of true understanding on this topic, and I have always had
problems understanding "circular" arguments.

However, when I look up at the night sky I see a field of stars which are quite obviously in
some form of three deminsions. They extent away from me in all directions. I have been told
that many people once believed the earth was flat and the stars moved around it.

If the universe is flat ( has only width and length ), why does it appear to have such depth in all
directions.

Also, I have a problem thinking of an "explosion", which the big bang must have been, only
expanding in two directions within an unrestricted environment which must exist outside
the volumn of the universe itself.

Very cool and interesting post. Just makes one wonder how much the universe is growing by the second.

reply to post by CLPrime
That's really interesting contributions you are making to an already interesting post. I suppose light is as big a mystery in itself. I did want ask though, if you had a reason to refer to space as being stretched, as opposed to space itself expanding along with all the visible matter.

Originally posted by hdutton
reply to post by CLPrime

 

I must admit to a limited amount of true understanding on this topic, and I have always had
problems understanding "circular" arguments.

However, when I look up at the night sky I see a field of stars which are quite obviously in
some form of three deminsions. They extent away from me in all directions. I have been told
that many people once believed the earth was flat and the stars moved around it.

If the universe is flat ( has only width and length ), why does it appear to have such depth in all
directions.

Also, I have a problem thinking of an "explosion", which the big bang must have been, only
expanding in two directions within an unrestricted environment which must exist outside
the volumn of the universe itself.

The most difficult, perhaps impossible, concept is that of the existence of "nothing". That statement is itself an oxymoron, a contradiction. Try to comprehend "nothing" whatsoever. No matter, no vacuum in space, no space, no dimensions, the absence of everything, pure nothingness. No objects, no space between objects, nothing. If the "big bang" theory is true, then what was it that existed outside the boundaries of the singularity which erupted in a big bang to form our universe. The preceding question is nonsensical. The singularity is described as a "point". Of course, that's nonsense. A "point" can only exist in a reality that has dimensions where a point is perhaps the smallest describable dimension or, alternatively, a point is thought of as a location with no dimensional properties ascribed to it. But, in the absence of a reality that has dimensions, the idea of "location" is meaningless since location has meaning only in relation to other objects, properties, or attributes. We don't have words to describe the existence of nothing at all, i.e. pure nonexistence and, acccordingly, no ability to conceptualize it.

reply to post by DerepentLEstranger


here is a recent announcement about the oldest galaxy ever found

Astronomers have glimpsed the most distant galaxy ever detected — a lone object 13.2 billion light years from Earth. The discovery implies that the fledgling Universe was emptier than was previously imagined.

The galaxy was spotted in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, an infrared image of the night sky that contains the faintest and farthest objects so far pictured. The finding "pushes the data to the very limits", says Rychard Bouwens, an astronomer now at Leiden University in the Netherlands and a co-author of the study, which is published today in Nature1.

link

so if this galaxy is 13 billion light years away from us the light has been "traveling" for 13 billion years for us to image it. so what does this galaxy look like now?

we use a gravatational lense to "see" back in time
what is there "now"

if light traveled away from this galaxy in the oposite direction to us how far "out" is that light?
13 billion light years to us and 13 billion light years into the oposite direction.

so from our position how far can we see in the oposite direction away from the galaxy?

13 billion years and what about the light from the galaxy in the oposite direction?
so if we just use light as an example

13 billion ly away from oldest galaxys first light + 13 billion ly to earth +13 billion ly to as far as we can see first light in the oposite direction+ 13 billion ly the first light has traveled in the oposite direction.

which if using light would be a total of 52 billion light years that we lnow light has had the time to travel
(outside of cosmological expansion)
so the minimum distence (without cosmological expansion) that first light could have reached is
52 billion ly (by observable universe theory) not accounting for cosmological expansion

so can we account for red shift in another way using lenses?

xploder

The universe is a fun place to be.