expansion of the universe (was Re: JOIN [sl4]: Hello, I'm Mercy.)

From: Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Date: Thu Apr 17 2003 - 18:01:16 MDT


"Lee Corbin" <lcorbin@tsoft.com> writes:
> Robin writes
>
> > I thought [the universe] was ~15 GLY wide.
>
> That's merely the radius of the visible universe 8^D

The visible universe is 42 billion light years in radius, even though
the age of the universe is only 13.7 billion light years (to within
1%, according to the WMAP data). This, apparently, because of the
expansion of the universe. I don't pretend to understand how the
universe could have expanded such that two points separated at a rate
greater than c -- perhaps someone with a physics background could
explain about this.

> See the mind-blowing Tegmark essay
>
> http://it.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302131

Looks very much like a technical version of the SciAm article just
published -- quite cool!

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com


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