Astronomical Numbers

Talk about making you feel insignificant. Nothing quite does it like big numbers related to astronomy.

New observations by a NASA space probe have produced some data that talks about what happens immediately after the Big Bang. It's theorized that an event called "inflation" took the universe from the size of a gumball to approximately the current dimensions. How long did this inflationary period take? Millions of years? Hardly.

One trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Talk about a short time. Talk about a unfathomable increase in size!

The study also reconfirmed the approximate age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, give or take several hundred million. Which I suppose means that the universe is approximately 28 billion light years across... if the light travels from the explosion at 186,000 miles per second...for 14 billion years in each direction....

What do you suppose is beyond the leading edge of energy?


EDIT: I just heard that the odds for correctly completing a NCAA bracket with all 64 teams is 1 in 9,000,000,000,000,000,000. If my zeros are correct, that's nine million trillion. Good luck on your office pools!

Comments

  1. This is the kind of stuff that makes your head hurt after a few minutes. The visible universe is 28 billion light-years across, but just because we can't see it yet, doesn't mean there's nothing beyond that horizon. What we can see may only be a tiny fraction (maybe even an infinite fraction?) :-) of what's really out there.

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