06. Does space go on forever or does space have boundaries? (A K2S Question)

From The Space Library

This is one of the more perplexing questions one can ask about space-time! Scientists believe in the cosmological principle which states that the matter in our Universe is uniformly distributed throughout space-time with no center or edges. Our Universe was actually formed in an instant through a process called the big bang which resulted in a rapid inflation of space-time. Basically, there are no boundaries to the Universe. Scientists are still gathering evidence to determine if the Universe is finite or infinite. Strong evidence for the reality of the big bang was discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson who worked for Bell Labs in 1965 when they detected the cosmic microwave background radiation. This was a uniform microwave signal that permeated the entire night sky with a microwave signal indicating a temperature of about 454° F. This temperature was predicted by the big bang theory and now confirmed by their observations. A NASA satellite called cosmic background Explorer satellite (COBE) in the 1990s confirmed this spectrum and a more recent analysis by the W-MAP clearly shows slight variations in the microwave background radiation. All this reinforces that something like the big bang really did create our entire Universe in an instant and that this expansion of space is continuing today. It also allowed us to accurately gauge that the size of our observable Universe is 13.7 billion light years. It is an amazing feat of human ingenuity—human beings have used math and science to actually measure the limits of the observable Universe—a limit that is a result of the speed of light being 186,000 miles per second.

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Answer provided by Jim Zebrowski

Question and Answer extracted from the book Kids to Space - by Lonnie Schorer

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