Why is the universe so big?

Question

The Universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old. But yet it is 80 billion light years across. Isn't this a contradiction?

Answer 1

This question implicitly refers to the visible universe, but we should state that explicitly, as otherwise the question doesn't make any sense.

It may seem like we shouldn't be able to see more than 13.7 billion light-years (13.7 giga-light-years, or glyrs) away, but that reasoning omits the expansion of spacetime according to General Relativity. A photon emitted from somewhere near the beginning of the Universe would have traveled nearly 13.7 glyrs if you had measured each light-year just as the photon crossed it, but since those light-years that you measured have expanded since the photon passed through, that distance now adds up to about 80 glyrs.

Answer 2

The universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all physical matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space.

No one knows if the universe is infinitely large, or even if ours is the only universe there is.

Although our view of the universe is limited, our imaginations are not. Astronomers have indirect evidence that the universe of galaxies extends far beyond the region we can see. But no one knows if the whole universe is infinitely large - large beyond limit.

According to the leading theories, other parts of the universe may look very different from our own - and may even have different laws of nature. We may never be able to find out for sure. But it is possible that clues to the answer lie in plain view, just waiting to be discovered!

I should note also the "80 billion light years across" it doesn't count as a contradiction. I don't know what your reference is but I believe that this concerns the region that we can see yet of this Universe.

Answer 3

Yes this does sound like it might be a contradiction but in fact it isn't. It's because the universe has been expanding rapidly in every direction since the big bang and our observations are limited by the speed of light.

For example if we observe a distant quasar that appears to be 10 billion light years away, the light from the quasar is 10 billion years old (which is why quasars are known for being some of the most ancient phenomena in the universe). In the time it took for that light to reach us the universe has been expanding. In fact the expansion has been accelerating all that while so the distance between us and that quasar is at this present time considerably larger than 10 billion light years.

If we had a means to observe distant objects as they appear right at this instance, not only would we have a type of time machine but we might observe the universe to be 80 billion light years across, although I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the 80 billion light year figure given on the wikipedia page.

Astronomers and physicists also struggle with the question of "what is it that the universe expanding into". Is it expanding into empty space and if so is there anything that lies out there beyond our universe at some vast distance? If so, the universe may be infinite.

Or does the universe fold back in on itself on some higher dimensional plain i.e. if we had a hypothetical means to travel faster that the rate of the expansion of the universe and travelled in a straight line, would we eventually end up back in the same spot? In this scenario the universe would have a theoretical boundary at any one time.

Answer 4

The radius of the observable universe is about 46 billion light years, which is considerably greater than its age of about 14 billion years. Since the radius of the observable universe is defined by the greatest distance from which light would have had time to reach us since the Big Bang, you might think that it would lie at a distance of only 14 billion light years, since $x=ct$ for motion at a constant velocity $c$. However, a relation like $x=ct$ is only valid in special relativity. When we write down such a relation, we imagine a Cartesian coordinate system $(t,x,y,z)$, which in Newtonian mechanics would be associated with a particular observer's frame of reference. In general relativity, the counterpart of this would be a Minkowski coordinate frame, but such frames only exist locally. It is not possible to make a single frame of reference that encompasses both our galaxy and a cosmologically distant galaxy. General relativity is able to describe cosmology using cosmological models, and this description is successful in matching up with observations to a high level of precision. In particular, no objects are observed whose apparent ages are inconsistent with their distances from us.

One way of describing this difference between special relativity's $x=ct$ and the actual distance-time relationship is that we can think of the space between the galaxies as expanding. In this verbal description, we can imagine that as a ray of light travels from galaxy A to galaxy B, extra space is being created in between A and B, so that by the time the light arrives, the distance is greater than $ct$.

None of this has anything to do with inflation. Inflation makes certain testable predictions about cosmological observations (e.g., it predicts that the universe is spatially flat), but it's irrelevant for understanding why the radius of the observable universe has the size it does in comparison to the age of the universe. Inflation may not even be correct. If inflation turns out never to have happened, it will have no effect on this particular question.

It turns out that we can get a surprisingly good estimate of the size of the observable universe using a simplified FRW cosmological model consisting only of dust, i.e., nonrelativistic matter. The approximation is good because the universe has spent most of its history dominated by matter, with only a very short period early on that was radiation-dominated, and another fairly recent era that is dominated by the cosmological constant. In accord with the current observational data, we make a second approximation, which is that the universe is spatially flat. In a spatially flat FRW model, the $r-t$ part of the metric is of the form $ds^2=dt^2-a^2dr^2$, where the scale function $a$ depends on time. For a photon, $ds=0$, and we can then show that the proper distance traversed by a photon since shortly after the Big Bang is given by $L=a \int dt/a$. For a matter-dominated solution, $a$ is proportional to $t^{2/3}$, and we find $L=3t$. This is quite close to the $L/t$ ratio of about 3.3 given by the most realistic models. It also makes sense that the result is somewhat greater than 3, because the universe has now entered an era in which its expansion is accelerating. In the future, $L/t$ will become greater and greater.