RickJay, I was taught how what you just posted can’t be right, but I can’t grasp it tight enough to explain. The part about the ‘unseen’ universe being more than 14 billion ly is incorrect. Everything is 14billion years old…observable or not.
I’m out of my depth though. Paging Chronos, who usually is the poster that can break things down for me to understand better.
Since the universe is expanding, finding the distance to things far away can be a troublesome exercise. We see the edge of our observable universe as if it were 14 billion light years away, corresponding to the age of the universe. That’s because when that light was emitted from that spot, 14 billion years ago, it was 14 billion light years away.
However, the universe has expanded greatly since then, and so that spot is much more than 14 bly away by now (I think the current estimate is around 46). The light we’re getting from it is out of date, so it looks much closer than it really is.
Beyond that, it’s impossible to say how much more there is out there. The longer time passes, the more light from farther away will reach us, and so our observable universe will grow with time.
Wow… I feel even more mathematically challenged than when I flunked Algebra 2. 930 Ym? Is that a number or something? What I glean however is that humans are really really small compared to The Universe. I’m wondering if there is anything as small to humans as The Universe is large? There was a scene in Animal House where Pinto smoked pot with Donald Sutherland and was wondering the same thing…
Well, I’ll step in for Chronos here. RickJay is correct that much more Universe lies outside our 13.8 billion light-year backyard. The Universe as we know it was created by the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. The observable universe is a sphere of radius 46 billion light years, as Yumblie says. Where Yumblie is wrong is in saying that the objects at the edge of our observable universe were 13.8 billion light years away when they emitted the light we see now. They were much, much closer than that. The missing ingredient is inflation.
Inflation caused objects in the Universe to expand away from each other much faster than the speed of light (this does not violate Einstein’s limit, since it was spacetime itself doing the expanding, not the motion of matter). That means that there are some objects that emitted light in our direction and were then whisked away by inflation at an exponential rate, to a distance far beyond where light would have had to originate to just be reaching us now. Meanwhile, the light those objects already emitted was not pulled nearly so far away, and remained close enough to us to head our way and hit our telescopes. This is how we see things beyond 13.8 billion light years distance.
According to the currently-accepted Lambda-CDM parameters of inflation, the atoms that emitted the cosmic microwave background were about 36 million light years away from us when they did so. That sphere of radius 36x10^6 ly was expanded by inflation to a sphere of 46x10^9 ly by inflation. But again, this is only the observable universe. Everything outside that 36x10^6 ly sphere is the entire rest of the Universe. We have no idea how much else there is, because we can’t see it. So yes, everything is 13.8 billion years old, observable or not, but because of inflation most of it is much farther away than 13.8 billion light years.
Oh, and beo.thuck - Ym stands for Yottameters. One Yottameter is 10^24 meters. It’s big.
Thank you for sharing that - my mind is officially blown now.
Mine’s bigger.
here’s a way to imagine the scale of the universe, without using numbers:
Stretch out your arms to the widest you can reach on both sides.
The distance between your hands is a timeline-- the age of the universe. The Big Bang happened on your left hand, and today is happening on your right hand.The planet earth has only existed for the width of your right palm. The dinosaurs began where your right pinky finger is. Homo sapiens has only existed for the width of one strand of hair.
Um. No. I am.
You can track them by the sounds they make?!! And the egg cocoons are the size of grapes?!! Aiieee! Remind me never to build an underground house in that valley…
How is saying that “strings” and “quantum foam” exist any different from creation myths about giant turtles?
More math. 
The existence of strings and quantum foam is postulated to explain observable phenomena. Experiments are designed, based on ideas of what strings and quantum foam should do, and the results of those experiments figure in to the design of the next experiments.
The theory of turtles was derived from mystical speculations rather than observed phenomena, and so far, turtles have not produced any quantifiable results.
So then strings and quantum foam are like placeholder terms, or variables in algebra like “x” and “y”?
I don’t understand how anyone can say how large or small strings and quantum foam are, placing them in a scale of sizes as that website does.
Would you like my liver then?
Sings
So remember when you’re feeling rather small and insignificant,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth.
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'cuz there’s bugger all down here on earth.
That was cool. “Yoctometer” is now my favorite word.
Yumblie and Spatial, thank you for going over it for me. Everytime it is explained, I kinda get it a bit better. It doesn’t stick, but it gets stickier each time.
I sense a tautology here: Are you saying that the Universe is 14 billion years old, because we can’t see further than 14 billion light years, so there can’t be a light source more than 14 billion light years away?
So, next year, a telescope is built that can see 140 billion light years, and the Universe gets 10 times older?
Wow…
When I first saw that term, I thought “Why didn’t they just call it Lottameters?”, a name as equally as silly but more evocative of there being many of something!
No, that’s not correct. Read Spatial Rift 47’s post again. We can see farther out than 14 billion light years.
This is because space itself is expanding, and can expand faster than the speed of light without violating the Relativity Theory.