If Space is a vacuum with nothing in it, then what would the edge of the universe even mean

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…it would be a ‘border’ between nothing and nothing?

In: Planetary Science

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Anonymous 0 Comments

This was one of the first arguments made by the ancient Greeks for why the universe must be infinite. If you reached the edge and stuck your hand through it, what would you reach?

There are a few solutions, one being that you call whatever is outside a hyper-universe (this would be like the idea that we are living in a 3d bubble that exists within a higher dimensional soup). Another is that, like the Earth, the universe is round so that if you go far enough in any direction you eventually end up where you started. If this were true the actual size of the universe would have to be billions of times larger than we currently know since it looks flat to us.

When scientists today talk about the edge of the universe they mean the edge of the visible universe. This is because looking far away is like looking backwards in time. Eventually we hit a place where everything is universally hit and universally crammed together so that you can’t see past it. We call this point the big bang. So we are certain that, way over there, the universe is much like it is here, we just won’t be able to see what is happening over there right now until billions of years in the future.

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