if space is infinite does that mean there are an infinite number of stars?
In: Mathematics
Space is not infinite. It grows. If it grows, it can’t be infinite. Also, if it were infinite, every inch of the the sky you look up to would be filled with stars.
Edit: the thing with the star filled sky, well, you guys have convinced me, I didn’t think that to the end, with light traveling at light speed and so on. Okay.
But if you believe in the Big Bang, you cannot simultaneously believe in the infinity of space. It all started in a dense microscopic bean, which means it had limits, then it grew very fast and very much, and it still is growing. How does that fit to infinity?
There is really no way to know for certain. First, we don’t know if space is infinite or just really big. Second, you run into locality problems with infinity. We have a ton of stars/galaxies that extend out as far as we can see. We have no reason to think it isnt the same all the way out.
But we also don’t have anything that really proves it is. We could also just be inside a giant, but limited area filled with stars surrounded by infinite nothing. And if space is infinite there is no real way to prove that isn’t the case, because no matter how far you travel, there is still an infinite distance left to go.
*Note, science doesn’t do inability to disprove as support of concept. My scenario of a clump of stars surrounded by infinite nothing is unsupportable scientifically because it can’t be tested and can’t be proven.
So far as we know, there is a finite amount of matter/energy created by the big bang. so no matter how much space there is, there will be a finite number of stars since matter itself is finite.
we could be wrong, but nothing we ever do (unless ftl works some how) will ever get humanity out of the local group of galaxies, so functionally, there is a finite, but vast, number of stars.
Assuming the universe really is infinite than presumably yes, but we will never be able to interact with many of those stars because there comes a point where the expansion of the universe is faster than the speed of light.
As far as we can tell, the universe seems to be infinite.
This means there *could be* an infinite number of stars, sure. *Are* there? *shrug* We’ll never really know.
We can only see as far as light has been able to travel in 14 billion years. Since light travels at a finite speed, we can’t see what’s, say, 100 billion light years away, because if there’s anything out there, the light from it hasn’t reached us yet.
According to our best current theory, space expanded much, much faster than the speed of light for a fraction of a second during the Big Bang, and has continued to expand at a slower but measurable rate since then. This is how light from the very first stars and galaxies can be hitting out telescopes now, but it also means that in the 14 billion years their light has been going through space, space has expanded more – so those stars are more than 14 billion light-years away.
Thus, the farthest (& oldest) things we can see are now about 46 billion light years away from us, in any direction. This is the size of the *observable universe*. This distance is always growing, at the speed of light – in one year, light emitted from one light-year farther away at the start of the universe will have had time to reach Earth. We estimate that there’s maybe several hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.
It’s reasonable to assume that there’s more stuff beyond that, since it’s not a real boundary in space. Whether it goes forever, or “stops” somewhere, or if 3D space is “curved” and you’d eventually end up “looping back around” like going around a globe, these are all hypotheses, but I don’t know how we’d ever get evidence to actually narrow it down to one answer.
As far as I know, in mathematics there are infinities that are larger than others, and they are abstract concepts that escape our understanding. That a space is infinite does not imply that it must be full, although there may be such an absurd number of stars that for us it is infinite. Short answer, yes, long answer, I feel like a worm in the universe.
Yes. We can’t prove its infinite but to all observations the universe looks like it would look if it was infinite, and the laws of physics seeming to be the same for every point in the universe indicate that there’s no real mechanism for it to have an end.
Looking back in space is looking back in time. The furthest we’ve seen is 13.8 billion years, roughly the age of the universe. The galaxies that far away(and that far back in time) are redshifted. That means that they are moving away from us. Like sound that travel away from us are experienced at a lower frequency than sound right next to us (like when a car passes you with high speed), light behaves the same way. Low frequency lightwaves are seen as reddish. A guy named Hubble also discovered that galaxies farther away from us move away from us at a higher speed than closer galaxies. Suggesting that the universe is expanding faster than we can see.
With this in mind, i would say the amount of stars are incalculable, not infinite.
Incredible implications if it is truly infinite
Thought experiment
Imagine you had 9 spheres and you had to arrange them in a different grid pattern each minute that passes – eventually you would have repetition right?
Now image those spheres are the atoms in the universe and each minute is the infinity of space time
Is there an identical earth with an identical me out there somewhere 🤔😂
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