By IANS,
London : Just how big is the universe is a question that has baffled cosmologists for decades. But now scientists have reasons to believe that it is at least 250 times bigger than the visible universe.
Researchers at Oxford University and Imperial College, London, focused on measuring the curvature of the universe.
Should it be flat or open, then the universe must be infinite, but if it is closed like a sphere, then it has to be of a limited size.
Researcher Mihran Vardanyan and his team have come up with a new complex method of analysing all previous research they call the Bayesian method, the Daily Mail reports.
A main source of data they used was measuring the size of waves in the early universe that became frozen in the cosmic microwave background – or baryonic acoustic oscillations – using telescopes in space.
They found that the most likely model is a tightly constrained curvature of the universe – which means it’s flat.
It’s also at least 250 times bigger than the ‘Hubble volume’, which is approximately the size of the visible universe.
Scientists recently worked out the size of the visible universe using data collected by Hubble Space Telescope.
Last week, astronomers discovered the oldest and most distant object in the universe. The cluster of stars, dust and gas was spotted by Hubble as it orbited Earth. Its light took 13.2 billion years to reach our planet.
The galaxy is so remote, scientists are observing it at a time when the universe was in its infancy, just 480 million years after the Big Bang.