How big is our universe...

A man i talked to at work yesterday said that 50 billion galaxies is an estimated 5% of our universe.

First off thats ****ing astonishing. If true.

Has anybody else heard that little factoid? I was always pretty sure that we did not know the size of our universe, other than the fact that it is expanding. But then again that was only an estimation.

But anyhow just a quick question to verify if that was a true statement and if anyone else had heard it.

Lessee if 50 billion is 5%, then that would mean >scribblescribble< [carry the one] there are a trillion galaxies in the universe.

Actually, no one knows. It's a guess. But it's BIG, man. Really big. Like maybe infinitely big. Which would be a much bigger space than you'd ever want to wallpaper, even with your brother-in-law's help.

That big.

I don't believe we could ever know the definitive number of galaxies until we can travel into deep space, until then we can have fun estimating. And even though I still don't think we will ever know....H-U-G-E

check out this video

Just think this:

The stars we see at night, if during a clear night-sky, is about 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 (and so on and) .1 of all the stars that exist in our galaxy alone. Each of those stars most certainly have a whole solar system of their own. I mean, we can't even get through 1/4 of our solar system. And then outside our galaxy are hundreds of billions of other galaxies, each which contain probably 200 million stars (and remember that each star has their own solar system). That alone pretty much sums it all up.

Oh, and this video is really interesting:

www.youtube.com...

[edit on 1-6-2007 by ZikhaN]

No one really knows, but the estimates I've seen are anywhere from 50-200 billion galaxies in the known universe. One trillion galaxies does not seem far-fetched at all, IMO.

Note also the use of the term 'known universe'. We haven't detected anything past about 13 billion light years, but that's quite possibly a limitation of our current telescopes and detection techniques. The universe may be far larger and older than we can currently observe.

The observable universe, that is the sphere of space that we are able to observe because
its light has traveled far enough to be viewable by us is 93 billion light-years,
or in more familiar terms, 546,747,000,000,000,000,000,000 (546 sextillion) miles in size.

Baryonic matter, that is the stuff that makes up you, me, the stars, galaxies and
everything we see makes up about 4% of the Universe, Non-Baryonic matter,
otherwise known as Dark Matter makes up about 23% of the Universe and Dark Energy makes
up the other 73% of the Universe.

There are more than 100 billion galaxies, ranging from dwarfs with as few as tens of
millions of stars to giants with over a trillion stars.
Our own galaxy has about 300 billion stars.
Scientists estimate that there are around 70 sextillion stars in the observable Universe.


The Universe is incredibly large, so large that most people can not even imagine the
sheer size of what we can observe, let alone of how big it actually is.


Add to that that our own Universe is most likely only one of a near infinite (if not infinite) amount
of Universes within a possibly infinitely large Multiverse.


Anyways, I hope that helped.

the universe is so big that if you knew how big it really was your head would explode like someone put a firework in a catelope