The Universe is 13.8 billion years old and 46.5 light years in circumference. The Universe is 13.8 Billion Years Old, But the visible Universe is 92 Billion Light Years wide. The early Universe itself expanded at a rate faster than light.
A light-year is the distance light can travel in a year, and nothing can go faster than that—in the Universe, a straight line doesn’t necessarily define distance, nor do those distances remain the same over time. Space isn’t flat and is also inextricably linked to time in the form of spacetime. The fabric of the Universe isn’t just space but spacetime. Our Universe is expanding. Spacetime is a kind of backdrop to which the galaxies are effectively nailed. That backdrop is not material; it can develop at any rate.
The expansion of space is not slowing down; it’s speeding up. We are losing 20,000 stars every second to an area that will forever remain beyond our future view. We can currently see objects 46 billion light years away, but we see them as they were in the distant past.
What lies beyond our perception? Nobody knows. Our sun is 94 million miles away. Light leaving the sun takes eight minutes to get here. Black holes block out the surrounding light. It took 380 thousand years after the Big Bang for light to begin. Stars are all round, but the Universe is primarily flat.
Neutrinos have almost zero mass. They are so small they zip right through mass. A neutrino is a subatomic particle similar to an electron but has no electrical charge and a tiny mass. They are everywhere. Neutrinos are produced in nuclear reactions. Neutrinos are extremely difficult to detect because they interact weakly with other particles.
Our sun will expand into a red giant in one billion years. It will eat up our earth. Our sun ends up as a white dwarf before it goes black.
The new Webb telescope has discovered six galaxies from the very early Universe that shouldn’t exist. They’re thought to have formed incredibly early in the cosmological timeline, only about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. The Webb telescope has also found a black hole with a mass of more than 9 million suns. A key ingredient for life is carbon. The element has many empty spaces in its electron shell, making it capable of arranging solid bonds with many other elements. Our telescope found a lot of carbon in the early Universe—Saturn, whose massive, dazzling array of rings has a tiny moon with frozen water.
A dust and star galaxy. This galaxy is spouting off new stars at a record pace.
Behind this cluster sits an even more distant galaxy. This photo shows the central region of the galaxy cluster. This image includes the supernova in its parent galaxy. Its double core gives it a complex shape.
The Webb telescope has found numerous early-universe galaxies with large masses and well-developed disks—in fact, they occur about ten times more frequently than expected.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s view of the spectacular Phantom Galaxy(Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team).
