• Question: Is the universe infinite?

    Asked by Katerina to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      Maybe! We’re not sure.

      Perhaps it goes on forever and ever without stopping or repeating. Or maybe if you keep going far enough in one direction, you end up back where you started – like if you picked a direction now and started walking, eventually you’d go right around the Earth and end up back where you are now. (You’d probably have to swim a bit too, but hopefully you get the idea…)

      It could be that the universe is like that too…we don’t know!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      As far as we know, the universe is infinite in space- it’s a bit weird to think about, but the universe doesn’t seem to be shaped so that it loops back on itself, it seems to be almost exactly flat. And if it’s flat there’s no need for an “edge” to the universe, so mathematically often the assumption is that the universe is in fact infinite spatially – so no matter how long you traveled in one direction, there would always be more universe.

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