this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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[–] niktemadur@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

As a grown man who has always been into astronomy, have read books and magazines, watched series and documentaries for decades now, I recently felt this way again while delving into the geometries of cosmology.

Things like The Cosmic Horizon, the very far edge of light's ability to reach us as it has travelled for 13.8 billion years, yet the source of that light is now 46.5 billion light years away from us. This is our largest cosmological compass, we can trace the circle and do some abstract math with it.

They have traced triangles inside the sphere of light that surrounds us and figured out the angles from that light, and there are two options:

  1. The Universe is flat and possibly infinite.
  2. If the Universe is curved, it is so incomprehensibly huge that we cannot detect its' curvature even with our compass of 46.5 billion light years, must be at bare minimum 250 larger than what we can see, and that works out to 11.5 trillion light years in every direction from us, or a diameter of 23 trillion light years.
    Yet the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old.