Beyond The Great Beyond
Hello, welcome back to The Heavy Stuff (THS) - thanks for your visit today. Today THS would like to look at a recent story found in National Geographic about, literally, our ENTIRE observable universe. Here’s that link http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081105-dark-flow.html - as you can see — the new term to be aware of if you want to be up on the latest in cosmology is `dark flow’.
It seems a team of scientists were able to determine that everything in the observable universe is `flowing’ in one direction (at nearly 2 million miles per hours) — yes, EVERYTHING. Which supposedly would mean that `some structure or structures’ are literally pulling our entire observable universe. These`structures’ would be `beyond’ our observable universe - pushed there - during the brief `inflationary’ period at the opening moments of our entire universe.
Being a `curious’ blog - one dedicated to realities big mysteries - this story struck THS’s fancy - meaning - it was time to investigate just `how large’ the observable universe would actually be. When doing some legwork, it was surprising how many `answers’ there have been to the question `what is the size of the universe’ in just the last decade or so.
Answers ranged from 26 billion light years to over 150 billion light years. Most of the answers were `logical’ for their `time’ - but as the dark energy knowledge has become more known in the last decade - only `now’ in today’s information age, with the most up to date information - may humans finally be beginning to understand the real size of the volume of space we all live within - within observable limits.
The `best’ most up to date answer seemed to be on Wikipedia - which indicates that the observable universe is about 92 billion light years `wide’ (from one `side’ to the other). This 92 billion light year sphere is expanding at an amazing rate — but — the real story is that `beyond’ this 92 billion light year `diameter’ lies `structures’ large enough or with enough force - to influence this entire `space’ of observable reality.
Remember, reality is much more than just the observable universe, the full nature of this one reality `space’ is such that our observable universe MAY be just a speck in the totality of `space’. Dependent on how long inflation lasted after the BB. But, regardless of how large that space beyond our Observable Horizon is — we now know that it is large enough to house an unphantomable amount of force to move our entire knowable universe at two million miles per hour.
Makes one wonder if it might someday be possible to detect a slight `arc’ in the movement of our observable universe - if so, to THS - it could mean that we too, our universe including humans, are in an `orbit’ - just like electrons around every atom; just like the earth is around the sun; or, the sun around the milky way.
Perhaps, someday, the `size of our orbit’ — the orbit of our universe - will be determined to be of a particular size. And, we would all, finally, be represented as one - the goal of most religions. Real Heavy Stuff - and All Within - The Great Beyond.
Here’s some cool links about the size of the universe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040524.html
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/070320a.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=264290
http://www.physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/phys10/universe.pdf
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/universe_too_large.html
BTW, if you like fractals - try THS’s fractal wallpaper page at www.squidoo.com/fractals . Also, don’t forget to visit our daily anomalies link webpage at www.squidoo.com/anomalyman — and - please - buy a book today from the sidebar. Thanks.
