Cosmos Portal: The Universe
The Universe is by definition everything that physically exists in space and time. It originated in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The radius of the Universe is at least 78 billion light years. That is the distance to the point from which a photon of light originated which is now reaching us after traveling for 13.7 billion years. However the Universe could be far larger. There is no limit to the speed at which space itself may expand, so the Universe may stretch far beyond the Hubble horizon expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. It is also conjectured that our Universe may be only one of 10500 other universes which may have totally different laws of nature and which are collectively called a multiverse.
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Featured Article
Planck
Planck is Europe's first mission to study the relic radiation from the Big Bang. Ever since the detection of small fluctuations in the temperature of this radiation, announced in late 1992,...
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Featured Blog Post
Notes from the Astronomy Underground- Astropalooza
According to the tagline in Ridley Scott’s 1979 blockbuster Alien, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” It’s true that sound waves, unlike light, need a medium- some kind of...
Featured Resource
Atlas of the Universe
This web page is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. There are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars and then...
Latest News
Is Our Universe at Home Within a Larger Universe?
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (April 5, 2010) – Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? Such a...
Articles
Blog Posts
News Articles
- Dark Matter in a Galaxy
- Prototype developed to detect dark matter
- Three Galaxies Locked in a Gravitational Tug-of-War
- 'Dropouts' Pinpoint Earliest Galaxies
- LIGO Listens for Gravitational Echoes of the Birth of the Universe
- Researchers propose new way to reproduce a black hole
- Mysterious Space Blob Discovered at Cosmic Dawn




