across the universe and back in six minutes
Previously, when discussing the size of the universe, I posted a clip that gives us a sense of perspective as far as our place in the cosmos is concerned. However, the major limitation of that clip was its casual nature, so for all the awe inspiring numbers, it was just a rough approximation. This time, the American Museum of Natural History produced its own rendition of a similar video and not only is it beautifully done, it’s also built on real astronomical and astrophysical observations and provides an accurate overview of the known universe.
Just to give you a few numbers to consider, the distance spanned by this animation is roughly 13.5 billion light years which works out to some 79,361,442,507,666,400,000,000 miles. On the off chance you decide to drive from one end of the known universe and back home at highway speeds, the trip would take you a bit over 139 quadrillion years. Try to fly the same distance on a supersonic jet with the same cruising speed as the retired Concorde and you’ll spend just under 6.5 quadrillion years en route. Even the fastest satellites ever launched would require about 192 billion years to make the journey. However, there is a trick by which special relativity will let you survive a trans-universal trip in a human lifetime, provided you have a reliable way to travel within just a hair’s breath of the speed of light and can avoid collisions with all the objects in your way.
Still, we live in a very big universe and we don’t yet know exactly how big it is since the distances we’re talking about here are limited by our observational horizon. But just because we can’t see them, doesn’t mean there are no more galactic archipelagos beyond the 13.7 billion light year mark. In fact, the farthest objects we can detect with any instrument put the size of the universe at roughly 93 billion light years. What lies beyond that? That’s the realm cosmologists have been trying to explain for a while with few meaningful results, thanks in no small part to the limits imposed on our instruments by the complex laws of space and time…
“Even the fastest satellites ever launched would require about 2 billion years to make the journey. [roughly 13.5 billion light years]”
Beat the speed of light? Naw, just missed a few zeros. =)
Voyager 1, after all the speed change by gravitational assist etc is moving about 17.5 km/s relative velocity to the sun.
That means Voyager 1 will take about 230 trillion years to travel 13.5 billion light years.
At this velocity time dilation factor is 1.0000000017.
An interesting thing to note about this video, is that the universe may be only 13.5 billion light years old, but the current diameter of the universe, including the inflationary phase, works out to be roughly 93 billion light years. That is about 7 times greater than its age. (That is of course if the edge universe is still inflationary.)
This is due to the fact that what we see as the current edge of the universe is an image comprise of photons that are 13.5 billions years old. Red shift states that the “edge of the universe” is moving away at nearly the speed of light, and so in the last 13.5 billion years the edge has moved quite a distance away in that time.
In fact, no ship, no matter how close to the speed of light, will ever reach the edge of the universe, in earth time or in proper time.
Humm… across the universe and back in infinity! 8)
Now… to watch the video!
“Beat the speed of light? Naw, just missed a few zeros.”
Oh, whoops. Those pesky exponents in scientific notation, you just can’t take your eyes off them for a second. It’s actually 192 billion.
Error has been fixed.
Of course I really like this video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_J5rBxeTIk
;)
“Just to give you a few numbers to consider, the distance spanned by this animation is roughly 13.5 billion light years”
Actually, the animation goes out to the edge of the visible universe, which is half of the 93 billion light years you mention at the end. 13.5 billion years is just the time since the Big Bang, but space has been expanding since then, so we can see a lot further than 13.5 billion light years. Thus 13.5 billion light years is just another distance, and there’s nothing special about it, same as there’s nothing special about (say) 25 miles.
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Size_of_the_observable_universe
(That link also says the age of the Universe is 13.7 billion years, which I was taught it was, not 13.5)
Good video though.
“Actually, the animation goes out to the edge of the visible universe, which is half of the 93 billion light years you mention at the end.”
Not quite. The video states that it covers a distance of 13.7 billion light years from our planet which was adjusted for the dark ages right after the Big Bang for the purposes of the post. Considering that during the dark ages, the conditions were probably quite extreme, you might not want to send a spacecraft that far back.
Years ago, I recall doing a scale-comparison for a space chat site in answer to a question which indicated the usual lack of a sense of scale of the solar system. I can’t remember the exact numbers now, but it ended up something like…
Imagine the Earth is the size of an orange, then the moon is a large grey-black pea orbiting around it about two feet away.
At that scale, the sun is a ball of fire about twelve feet wide, and a mile away (and still too bright to look at.) Jupiter, size of a beach-ball, orbits five miles out from the sun; Saturn, a volleyball, ten miles. Kuiper belt starts around 50 miles, while the Oort cloud starts about a thousand miles and extends in all directions to fill the volume of the actual Earth.
The nearest star (Prox Cent) would be as far away from your orange-Earth as the actual moon – 250,000 miles away.
@ Paul – Why do I suddenly feel like we live on the backwater planet of Tattooine? But you know, without droids, lightsabers, or intersteller space ships (aka. the good stuff).