• Question: Is there an end to space?

    Asked by yasminwalter to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 14 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by joshhook, cai192546, bthomas, samanthadevine.
    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi yasminwalter! This is a great question, and one that has baffled humans for centuries!! There is no known end to space. But its actually really really hard to figure out just how big all of space is. The reason is that all our methods of studying things in the far out reaches of the universe depend on light reaching us from those points (this is how we see stars and galaxies!). The universe is 13.7 billion years old. In science we define a light-year as a measure of distance – it is the distance light will travel in one-year. So, the farthest distances we can see in the universe are about 13.7 billion light-years away. Anything farther than that the light just hasn’t gotten to us yet! So the universe could be much bigger and we just don’t know, although some clever people are trying to figure out ways around this =) In any case you will never hit an “end to space”, so its not something I would worry about!

    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I think Sara covered this! I used to think about this question a lot as a kid – like space going on forever seems really hard to understand…but if it stops that means its like in a box right so there must be something outside the box? And that just makes your head spin!! 🙂

    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Sara, you sure are the space expert..
      Good Q yasmin.

      Guess we’ll never know..

    • Photo: Kimberley Bryon

      Kimberley Bryon answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I always imagine that it is infinite but I guess that we will never know.

    • Photo: Drew Rae

      Drew Rae answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      The only thing I’ll add is that the galaxies are getting further away from each other, so the amount of space containing galaxies may actually be getting bigger over time, if that even makes sense. You’ve picked a great question – it’s so hard we don’t even know if the question makes sense or not!

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