Self Care – Astronomy Picture of the Week: The Observable Universe


(I’m also incorporating this series into my Self Care series for the foreseeable future…)

I guess this is the best way to follow up the last post. I’m using Wikipedia for this one.

This is one simulated image of the entirety of the observable universe. As I already mentioned last week, the universe is currently estimated to be roughly 93 billion lightyears in diameter, putting the edge around 46.5 billion lightyears away from us.

This image is taken from the Wiki page linked to above, as is the information I’m including about it and about the universe…

Observable_Universe_with_Measurements_01

Visualization of the whole observable universe. The scale is such that the fine grains represent collections of large numbers of superclusters. The Virgo Supercluster – home of Milky Way – is marked at the center, but is too small to be seen.

Diameter 8.8×1026 m (28.5 Gpc or 93 Gly)[1]
Volume 4×1080 m3[2]
Mass (ordinary matter) 1053 kg[3]
Density 9.9×10−30 g/cm3 (equivalent to 6 protons per cubic meter of space)[4]
Age 13.799±0.021 billion years[5]
Average temperature 2.72548 K[6]
Contents Ordinary (baryonic) matter (4.9%)
Dark matter (26.8%)
Dark energy (68.3%)

So the universe is not only old (to us), but huge.

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