[Q] What is the fastest thing in the Universe?

[gafa]

If light is the fastest thing in the Universe, how come the Universe to be 156 billion light years across if it is only 17.3 billion years old??

[sanctus]

I don't know where you get the number, they may be right but anyway the numbers do not influence the answer to your question.

Short answer (cause no time now) It is because of the expansion of the universe

[Tormod]

Basically it is because of the inflationary period right after the big bang.

 

Cosmic inflation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

The cosmos grew exponentially for a brief period, thus it is much larger than what the speed of light limitation dictates.

[modest]

The diameter of the universe was incorrectly "reported" to be 156 billion lightyears a few years ago and has been widely circulated around the internet since then. This is explained under size misconceptions here.

 

Best current theory has the diameter of the visible universe at 92 billion lightyears (this is slightly smaller than the "observable" universe) with an age of 13.7 billion years.

 

As Tormod and Sanctus say, it is possible for galaxies and other visible things to be 46 billion lightyears away even if the light has taken nearly 13.7 billion years to reach us because of expansion.

 

The furthest visible light we can see on earth right now is the cosmic microwave background radiation at 46 billion lightyears distance from us. When that light was emitted it was only 36 million lightyears away from the matter that would eventually become us. It took a great deal of time (13.7 billion years) for that light to travel that relatively short distance because the distance expanded 1,292 times over while the light was traversing.

 

~modest

[Moontanman]

What is the fastest thing in the universe? A two dollar hooker? Actually your question is a good one, science would say the during the early universe it expanded or inflated faster than the speed of light, This may seem to contradict relativity but actually space time can expand faster than light, a theoretical method of FTL travel is based on this concept. If indeed this happened it would explain how the universe is bigger than the time needed for light to cross it. Personally I think the universe is much bigger than we can perceive and what we call the big bang is a localized effect that we cannot see beyond.

[wapiti]

good question

[gafa]

I don't know where you get the number, they may be right but anyway the numbers do not influence the answer to your question.

Short answer (cause no time now) It is because of the expansion of the universe

 

17.3 for the universe's age I heard from Stephen Hawking

156 for the universe's diameter I saw on the tv program The Universe (Beyond the Big Bang)

[Michael Mooney]

Theoretical science is a lot like religious mythology. "Well respected theorists"... usually with reams of math to "back it up" (without a shred of observational evidence) will come up with things like "the inflationary model of the birth of cosmos" (without a clue or a care where all observable cosmic material came from *in the first place.*)

 

According to this one "In the beginning"... something called "space" (no-thing, really) expanded from some geometric point with no volume, no matter, no energy, no-thing at all... way faster than light... with no explanation at all as to the driving force for this expansion of "space" (commonly known as emptiness)... and made this theoretical cosmos Way bigger than it could have grown by any natural causes, like actual cosmic building materials exploding and traveling outward at speeds somewhat below "the fastest speed there is" (ref: "The Universe Song")... lightspeed.

 

Your question is a good one.

If you accept the inflationary model where space can expand faster than light via whatever unknown force and then cosmic "stuff" starts to magically appear, you may as well forget science and go to church and sing "praise the Lord" who created the cosmos out of nothing (like the above) by sheer force of Divine Will/Intent as "Creator."

 

BTW no one knows what lies beyond the "cosmic event horizon", as far as we can actually see given the real and actual limit of lightspeed.

 

I'm an advocate of scientific honesty about the degrees certainty about what knowledge science has found through objective observation.

 

The "original inflation of space" is near the bottom of the list of what we know from observation and actual verification/evidence in "the real, objective world/cosmos." (String theory with all of its "eleven dimensions" lies at the bottom also along with the above "inflation theory" and the sci-fi of "time travel.")

 

Epistemology is the study of what we know and how we know it. It is where philosophy and science find common ground. Anyone interested in what we actually know... especially in the context of this thread, would do well to check it out.

 

Michael

[justfun]

If light is the fastest thing in the Universe' date=' how come the Universe to be 156 billion light years across if it is only 17.3 billion years old??[/quote']

 

The age of the universe and the distance between 2 stars in the universe are 2 numbers difference .

[clapstyx]

I have a completely different view of the universe totally unsupported by any scientific data! I think of light as a concept of compound harmony such that the reverb of 3 concepts of harmony in harmony with each other creates an additional dimension to its own manifestation with an advanced consequence being the occurance of matter when the energy modulates through to the point of being that (as an early expression of its potentiality) and a living organism (as the advancement of the genesis process continues its exponentialisation) when it reaches that equivalency and so on until the compound on compound process meets the potentiality of its own equivalency (ie the creation equals the creator) This is ridiculous (so lets treat it as a joke) but theoretically you could reconcile the theory to the old testament which means (considering the "god created man in his own image" angle) that if we produced a concept of compound harmony which was in harmony with light the universe should respond with a universal equivalency. My theory then would be that in the first deliberate or coincidental instance to create a manifestation of that concept would result in the second coming and then the follow on would be then a more serious attempt to put every concept of harmony into a compound situation which would then cause a manifestation of heaven and complete the prophecy of global harmony with the freedom defining truth being that compound harmony always creates a greater reciprocal. If science were to pursue to create a concept of compound harmony much of the thinking of the planet would be united in focus upon a positive and that actually there would be a manifestation to the equivalency and heres why I say that. If you take the view that universal harmonic entropy was reached and could only gain extra propulsion once new additives were created by us and it works then we are on a universal wavelength with a shared common reality effectively all on a god level with our ability to add harmony to the universe whereby then the universe gains a new dimension and expresses it. To fine tune the process I would suggest the expression of compound harmony which we as humanity seek to create should be in harmony with both light and nature in some true way because then it links the cause with its own consequence completing then a theoretical chain to the continuation of both.

 

So in answer to the initial question regarding the fastest thing in the universe and why the boundary of the universe is apparently more light years away than the time since the big bang I think of it as light having taken on additional harmony and accelerated adding new dimensions to its potentiality because thats its nature.

[florin]

super luminosity it is faster than speed of light and when it losses energy it gets faster and when it gains energy it slow down and the slowest it can go is the speed of light