Daily Times

Scientists now know the universe is expanding, at an ever-increasing rate. So if it’s ballooning, what is it growing into? In other words, what is beyond the known universe?

There’s an edge to the observable universe—we can only see so far out. That’s because light travels at a finite speed (one light-year per year), so as we look at distant things we’re also looking backward in time. Eventually, we see what was happening almost 14 billion years ago, the remnant radiation from the Big Bang. That’s the Cosmic Microwave Background, which surrounds us from all sides. But it’s not really a physical “edge” in any useful sense.

Because we can only see so far, we’re not sure what things are like beyond our observable universe. The universe we do see is fairly uniform on large scales, and maybe that continues literally forever. Alternatively, the universe could wrap around like a (three-dimensional version of a) sphere or torus. If that were true, the universe would be finite in total size, but still wouldn’t have an edge, just like a circle doesn’t have a beginning or end.

It’s also possible that the universe isn’t uniform past what we can see, and conditions are wildly different from place to place. That possibility is the cosmological multiverse. We don’t know if there is a multiverse in this sense, but since we can’t actually see one way or another, it’s wise to keep an open mind.

The key concept to keep in mind is that space isn’t how we normally conceive of it. Conventionally, we think about space as being like a coordinate system — a three-dimensional grid — where the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and where distances don’t change over time.

In addition to that, the fabric of spacetime itself does not remain static over time. In a Universe filled with matter and energy, a static, unchanging Universe (where distances between points remain the same over time) is inherently unstable; the Universe must evolve by either expanding or contracting. If Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is correct, this is mandatory.

Observationally, the evidence that our Universe is expanding is overwhelming: a spectacular validation for Einstein’s predictions. But this carries with it a series of consequences for objects separated by cosmic distances, including that the distance between them expands over time.

Today, the most distant objects we can see are more than 30 billion light-years away, despite the fact that only 13.8 billion years have passed since the Big Bang.