Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed

[pominoz]

Fuck, i love this shit. :)

Thanks to Damocles and Skashion, great thread.

 

[Plaything of the gods]

Face of Big Bang appears on a piece of toast

 

[Skashion]

The matter outside the observable Universe wouldn't be able to be theorised as it is outside our observable Universe so we couldn't detect it. Our definition of observable Universe grows larger as technology increase but it is presumed that some of the matter created in our observable Universe has moved outside just as a consequence of the expansion of space and general acceleration of matter.

It might be worth explaining this to the layman actually. OK, Pominoz (and anyone else interested), pull up a chair. The size of the observable universe is 93 billion light years. A lot of people always ask how can the observable universe be that big when we've only been around 13.7 billion years and light can only travel at the speed of light. The reason for this is that light now reaching us was emitted by an object much much closer than 13.7 billion light years away and the expansion of space has meant it's only just arrived. We can calculate pretty accurately how far those objects are away now because of the expansion of space, and the limit of the furthest is called the observable universe.

The observable universe gets bigger with time as light from places billions of light years away will arrive given a shit load of time and will also be moving away. You can work it out quite easily, although this is the mega simplified back of a fag packet calculation. It would need hefty calculus to work it out properly and I've only got GCSE level maths. However:

Speed of light = 299,792 Km per second
Expansion of space = 67.8 Km per second per megaparsec
Megaparsec = 3.26 million light years

299,792/67.8 = 4,471.7 Megaparsecs
4,471.7 x 3,260,000= 14.4 billion light years

That means light emitted right now from an object 14.4 billion light years away will never ever reach us because the space in-between is growing faster than the speed of light. However, because light emitted within 14.4 billion light years region will reach us, even if it takes many hundreds of billions or trillions of years to reach us due to the expansion of space effectively 'slowing' the speed of light to a crawl in its effort to reach us, the observable universe will grow for a long long time yet.

 

[AlgarveBlu]

Managed to understand some of the explanations, but I really don't understand where the Big Bang came from? I.e was there just a minute ball of energy that exploded? Please answer me so I can get a good nights sleep...

 

[mindmyp's_n_q's]

Managed to understand some of the explanations, but I really don't understand where the Big Bang came from? I.e was there just a minute ball of energy that exploded? Please answer me so I can get a good nights sleep...

Where did it come from? Nothing. Something. Everything.

 

[BlueHammer85]

Managed to understand some of the explanations, but I really don't understand where the Big Bang came from? I.e was there just a minute ball of energy that exploded? Please answer me so I can get a good nights sleep...

You really think there's an answer to that ?

 

[blueinsa]

yet we cant find a fucking boeing 777?

 

[AlgarveBlu]

Managed to understand some of the explanations, but I really don't understand where the Big Bang came from? I.e was there just a minute ball of energy that exploded? Please answer me so I can get a good nights sleep...

You really think there's an answer to that ?

I thought all these boffins were working on a 'theory of everything'

 

[dazdon]

Well done Skashion and Damocles you've done well trying to convert this information into laymans terms.

 

[talkativesprout]

Managed to understand some of the explanations, but I really don't understand where the Big Bang came from? I.e was there just a minute ball of energy that exploded? Please answer me so I can get a good nights sleep...

You really think there's an answer to that ?

I thought all these boffins were working on a 'theory of everything'

You can't work on the theory of everything when the theory of nothing is still questioned.