How many square light years do you think the universe is? (A light year is about 5,878,786,100,000 miles.)?

Question

I think it is about 1,000,000,000,000 square light years. ( it is just a guess)

Answer 1

the universe is atleast 46 billion light years in radius

the equation for volume is 4/3*pi*r^3. (it would have to be cubed light years

so 4/3*pi*46 000 000 000^3 =

407 720 083 400 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 ly^3

if you wanna say it, it would be: four hundred seven nontillion seven hundred twenty octillion eighty three septillion four hundred sextillion.

awesome!

EDIT: Jeff has absolutely no idea what hes talking about. the universe is not 10 billion light years across. it is atleast 46 billion light years in radius, and if anyone would like to challenge that they can email me. the universe is obviously a sphere. and cosmologists never EVER round pi down to 3, and they would never never never never round it down to 1.

Answer 2

It sounds like just a guess.

I think it is 42 square light years because 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Answer 3

The universe would not be measured in square anythings.  You use square units to measure area, and cubic units to measure volume.  The "area" of our universe is really meaningless.  

If you want to know the volume of the universe, I think you are asking a question that is not really fully understood yet.  But let's say that we know that the universe is about 10 billion light years across, more or less.  The volume would be approximately 10 billion cubed, or (10^9)^3 or 10^27 cubic light years.  thats 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic light years.  Plus or minus a few nonillion.

But it's spherical, you say, not cubic (or what shape is it exactly?)?  Well, since we don't really know its size exactly, and I'm totally guessing on the length anyway, the difference between a sphere and cube is insignificant.  Cosmologists are known to round pi down to 3, and when that gives them too precise of an answer, the round pi down to 1.   I think you might also run into some problems with this calculation since the universe is supposedly expanding in 4 dimensions.  I don't know what a quadric light year looks like, but I bet it's pretty wild.

And Mallard mentioned something about 90 some billion light years across?  I thought the universe was supposedly only 14 billion years old, so I figured that 14 billion light years is the farthest apart two things could be without breaking the speed of light.  Maybe this has something to do with 4th dimensional expansion adding some extra miles in there somewhere?

Edit: OK, I looked it up on Wikipedia and it says the universe is bigger than it would be by the speed of light due to the expansion of space itself.  I guess that makes sense, so 92 billion light years across is possible.  And forgive my joke about rounding pi to 1; my point is that when we are making approximations anyway, there's no point in getting all wound up about a few decimal places.

Answer 4

why wud u ask that. we cant even get out of the galaxy so what does it matter

Answer 5

Well the main theory believed by most people nowadays is the expansion of the universe into nothing so if it is continuosly expanding we cannot really tell.

There might be one way; we could look at the redshift from the most distant object in space and we could tell how far the furthest thing is from us but we will never be able to tell how big the universe is.

Answer 6

Just think infinity, and convert that into a volume, it is slightly larger than your guess, which is an area, not a volume.

Maybe we live in a flat universe according to your calculations.

Answer 7

it takes 12,867 years to travel a light year :/

Answer 8

This question can not be answered. You would need a number to multiply 6 trillion by. The size of the universe is infinitely large and multiplying 6 trillion by infinity gives you a number  we ( or should I say " I " ) would not understand.

Answer 9

Since the universe is 3-dimensional, it cannot be measured in any "square" units. That is a measurement of area, not volume. It must be measured in cubic units, but I see no point at all in speculating as to how many cubic light years the universe contains. Very many.

Answer 10

The *visible* universe is  a sphere with a diameter of about 28 billion parsecs (about 92 billion light-years). That would work out to a spherical volume of about 4.6^32 (4.6 followed by 32 zeros) light years. Remember though that volume is constantly expanding. Also, we're talking here about the *visible* or *observable* universe. There is an unimagineably immense volume of the *entire* universe that we can never see because it's expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. That's okay with relativity because it's space that's expanding, not any 'thing' in it moving through space at FTL.