Why can’t we figure out roughly how big the non-observable universe is?

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If we know approximately how long it’s been since the Big Bang, and we know approximately how fast the universe expands/has been expanding, why can’t we get a good estimate on how big the non-observable universe is? Or more specifically, why can’t we figure out the radius on how far matter has spread out since the Big Bang?

In: Planetary Science

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m holding my hands apart… now… how far apart were they?

We can infer the size of the observable universe to be larger than the distance we can actually see because we can fill in the blanks. We know roughly how far objects we see are, we can measure how fast they are moving over time and how far they would be from us now.

If we can’t see it, we can’t measure it. We *might* be able to see it all, as in all that we see is all that there is. However, those odds are low, mostly because we’d be at the dead center of it.

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