• Question: How far dose space go?

    Asked by FootballFred03 to Andrew, Jade, Jessica, Kevin, Lynn on 17 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Benji.
    • Photo: Jess Wade

      Jess Wade answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      There are some great online graphics that will let you see this better than I could describe in words- look up ‘if the moon were only one pixel’. Space has been growing fo 14 billion years (14,000,000,000,000). Space grows at the speed of light, which is 300000000 m a second (way faster than me on a bike!). It’s too big for us to even think about! We cannot even see the outsides of space with the best telescopes.

      What scientists are really interested in is what shape the universe is. We think at the moment that it could be a sphere, like the football shape we were talking about before, or just completely flat. IF it is flat then it could just keep going because there are no edges. We call this ‘infinite’. Like Buzz Lightyear says- ‘to infinity, and beyond!’- well, space really is that big.

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