Answer 1:
To be honest, we don't really know what the
shape of the universe is - that's because we
can't see all of it! You may know that our
universe hasn't existed forever; in fact, our
universe is about fourteen billion years old (we
don't really know what happened "before" fourteen
billion years ago, or if it even makes sense to
talk about what happened "before", but physicists
have a few different ideas for what might have
been). But remember that light travels at a
finite speed. That means that in the fourteen
billion years since the universe was born, light
has only been able to travel fourteen billion
light years. So when we point our telescopes
into the night sky, the very farthest things we're
able to see are fourteen billion light years
away. That's why we say that the size of our
"observable universe" (that means the universe
we're able to observe) is fourteen billion light
years.
Now, there's more to the universe than just our
observable universe, but we don't know what it's
like because we can't see it! But in short,
that's why the universe has no end - it keeps
going and going, but we can't know anything about
it farther out that fourteen billion light years
because light from anything further away hasn't
had the time to reach us. Click Here to return to the search form.
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