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Appendix A - How big is the Universe?
Here is some real science for you.
Carl Sagan has this famous quote, that “there are more stars in the universe, then grains of sand in the world”. He is talking about all the sand, on all the beaches in the world.
You should know that stars, are just suns from another solar system. So our sun will look like a star to some else in another solar system. So you could say “there are more solar systems in the universe, then grains of sand in the world”
So how big is the universe, well in scientific terms it’s really, really, really big.
Below are some concepts from a BBC program with Professor Brian Cox, but is my version…
- Our Scientists can see about 13.5 billion light years away in one direction, so we can see 27 billion light years across the universe, if we look out both sides of the night sky, in the opposite seasons of the year.What is a light year? 1 AU (astronomical units) is 150 million kilometres (93 million miles). Well Pluto is 40 AU, from the Sun, and 1 light year is 63,270AU. So 1 light year is huge, and our solar system is only 0.0013 light years across. I am using 80AU as the size of our solar system in this calculation, by using Pluto to Pluto orbit on the other side of the sun.
They actually calculate our solar system to 122AU, which may include the Sun’s gravitational influence.Another concept is that if we pick any three points on the earth, to make a triangle, and we know the distance between the points, and we measure the angle we can determine the size of the earth. In a normal triangle we know from basic geometry that the angles always add up to 180 degrees. But a triangle drawn on a ball, the lines will curve over the ball and the angles added up will always measure less than 180 degrees. So from the angles, and distance between the points you can measure the size of the earth.
Well using three supernovas, so the brightness of the light will always be the same, at the edge of the universe the edge of this 27 billion light year bubble we live in. This bubble is just my imaginary ball, and it is just the zone, or area, that we can see. So from the brightness of these supernovas we can see, we can then measure the distance from us. So we have this triangle of three supernovas, on the inside of this universal bubble, or zone, that we can see inside of. So what is the angle inside this triangle we measured, the triangle of supernovas? Well it is always measured at 180 degrees, every time they repeat the experiment. What does this mean, it means the universe is much larger than the small area, our zone, our bubble that we can see within. So the universe is much bigger then the small area we see, the small area being 27 billion light years across.
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