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How big is the Observable Universe?

The Observable Universe is 880 yottameter

What’s So Big About the Observable Universe?

Did you ever look up at the night sky and wonder just how big the universe is? What if we told you it’s so big we can’t even see all of it? This part that we can see is called the Observable Universe. It’s like a giant cosmic bubble, and we’re right in the center of it. Let’s dive into the fascinating world of the Observable Universe and see just how big it is!

Size of the Observable Universe

When we talk about the size of the Observable Universe, we’re talking about something so enormous that we have to use a special measurement called a “light-year” to describe it. A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, which is about 5.88 trillion miles. The Observable Universe is estimated to be about 93 billion light-years in diameter. That’s a lot of light-years! To give you a better idea, if you were to drive a car at a speed of 60 miles per hour, it would take you about 200 trillion years to drive across the Observable Universe. That’s much, much longer than the Earth has even existed!

Size Comparison

Let’s compare the size of the Observable Universe to things we’re more familiar with:

  • The Observable Universe is so big that it could fit around 1 septillion (that’s a 1 with 24 zeros after it) Earths inside it. That’s more Earths than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world! - If the Observable Universe was shrunk down to the size of a football field, our entire Milky Way Galaxy (which is already huge) would be smaller than a grain of salt in the middle of it. - The Observable Universe is even bigger than the distance that the Voyager 1 space probe has traveled since it was launched in 1977. Voyager 1 is currently the farthest human-made object from Earth, but it has only covered a tiny fraction of the Observable Universe.

What’s in the Observable Universe?

You might think that with all that space, the Observable Universe must be filled with lots of stuff, right? Well, it is and it isn’t.

  • There are an estimated several hundred billion galaxies in the Observable Universe. Each of these galaxies contains billions, or even trillions, of stars.
  • Despite this, most of the Observable Universe is actually empty space. If you picked a random spot in the Observable Universe, the chances are high you’d end up in empty space, not near a star or galaxy. - Because light takes time to travel, when we look far away in the Observable Universe, we’re actually looking back in time. The farther away a star or galaxy is, the longer the light from it has been traveling to reach us. So, the Observable Universe is not just a place but also a history book of the cosmos!

Wrapping Up

The size of the Observable Universe is mind-bogglingly large, and it’s filled with an incredible number of galaxies, stars, and planets. But remember, this is only what we can see from Earth. There’s a whole lot more universe out there beyond what we can observe. So, next time you look up at the night sky, remember just how big the universe is and how small we are in comparison. It’s a humbling thought, isn’t it?

Smaller By Category
Distance to the HDF
The Hubble Deep Field is a picture of an empty spot in the night sky. The image had almost 3,000 objects in it - distant galaxies. It's unknown where these galaxies are now, but where they were 12.7 billion years ago is 12.7 billion light-years away from us.
Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall
The Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall is the largest known structure in the universe. It is made up of galaxies, and is called a galactic filament. We are not in it. In fact, it lies about ten billion light-years from us.
Gigaparsec
A gigaparsec is one billion parsecs. It is one of the largest measures of distance. There's really no need to have any measure larger, because the radius of the observable universe is only 14 gigaparsecs.
Larger By Category
Estimated Size of the Universe
The Universe is everything we know. Oh, also, the universe may be much larger than this, or could even be infinite! There's just no way to accurately measure the size. There may also be multiverses, too, but we'll never know for sure.