THE word “universe” encompasses a lot, time, space, planets, in short… everything.
But how old is it and is it expanding?
How old is the universe?
The simple answer is that we don’t know exactly.
The age, diameter and origin of the universe is one of the most intriguing and perplexing questions in the world astronomy.
As you can imagine, calculating size is quite a complex process, and that’s a universemajor understatement.
scientists make these estimates using the motion of stars to measure expansion.
It is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old, although estimates vary.
Some scientists have suggested it could be more than 2 billion years younger, at just 11.2 billion.
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How big is the universe?
The universe is vast on a level unfathomable to the human mind.
The observable universe is thought to have a total diameter of about 92 billion light-years.
Scientists can make educated guesses about its size by looking for the farthest observable point on our planet.
This should mean it is the oldest, as we are dealing with light years, and the light from these objects will take the longest to reach us.
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By finding the farthest point, we can roughly estimate a diameter.
Some scientists have suggested that the true size of the universe could be more than 250 times larger than the estimate of 93 billion.
This would make its diameter more than 7 trillion light-years.
Is the universe expanding?
The universe is expanding as a result of the aftermath of the Big Bang.
This colossal explosion spread matter and energy throughout the universe, and the expansion continues to this day.
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The continued growth of the cosmos is the yardstick by which experts date the universe. They do this by turning back the clock to the small point from which everything originated.
Although the explosion occurred thousands of millions of years ago, the thought is that due to a mysterious force known as dark energy, the expansion is actually accelerating rather than slowing down.
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