According to their estimates the universe is 13.7
We do not know the exact age of the universe, but we believe that it is around 13 billion years - give or take a few billion. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: (a) by looking for the oldest stars; and (b) by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang.
Astronomers have determined that our universe is 13.7 billion years old.
The universe is (nearly) 14 billion years old, astronomers confirm. With looming discrepancies about the true age of the universe, scientists have taken a fresh look at the observable (expanding) universe and have estimated that it is 13.77 billion years old (plus or minus 40 million years).
One study suggested that the "Methuselah Star" is older than the Universe itself. The Universe is thought to be 13.797 billion years old, with an uncertainty of ±0.023 billion years. In 2013, a measurement of the "Methuselah Star" suggested that it is 14.45 billion years old — older than the age of the Universe.
Microscopic grains of dead stars are the oldest known material on the planet — older than the moon, Earth and the solar system itself. By examining chemical clues in a meteorite's mineral dust, researchers have determined the most ancient grains are 7 billion years old — about half as old as the universe.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
The furthest light we can see is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the light left over from the Big Bang, forming at just 380,000 years after our cosmic birth.
Many religious persons, including many scientists, hold that God created the universe and the various processes driving physical and biological evolution and that these processes then resulted in the creation of galaxies, our solar system, and life on Earth.
Because space isn't curved they will never meet or drift away from each other. A flat universe could be infinite: imagine a 2D piece of paper that stretches out forever. But it could also be finite: imagine taking a piece of paper, making a cylinder and joining the ends to make a torus (doughnut) shape.
Far outside our solar system and out past the distant reaches of our galaxy—in the vast nothingness of space—the distance between gas and dust particles grows, limiting their ability to transfer heat. Temperatures in these vacuous regions can plummet to about -455 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 kelvin). Are you shivering yet?
It is estimated that there are roughly 200 billion galaxies (2×1011) in the observable universe. Most galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (approximately 3,000 to 300,000 light years) and are separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs).
We know that light takes time to travel, so that if we observe an object that is 13 billion light years away, then that light has been traveling towards us for 13 billion years. Essentially, we are seeing that object as it appeared 13 billion years ago.
The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure.
In about 100 trillion years, the last light will go out. The bad news is that the universe is going to die a slow, aching, miserable death. The good news is that we won't be around to see it.
There is no centre of the universe! According to the standard theories of cosmology, the universe started with a "Big Bang" about 14 thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever since. Yet there is no centre to the expansion; it is the same everywhere.
Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, adam is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as "mankind".
Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago.
The earliest life forms we know of were microscopic organisms (microbes) that left signals of their presence in rocks about 3.7 billion years old. The signals consisted of a type of carbon molecule that is produced by living things.
For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!
A 6ft man standing and looking out to the horizon can see approximately 5km away, as the Earth's surface curves out of sight. But our ability to see extends well beyond the horizon. It also depends on the amount of dust and pollution in the air, which usually limits normal vision to less than 12 miles.
And when you switch on your microwave telescopes, you can see the farthest – and oldest – object in the universe. It's called the cosmic microwave background, and it completely soaks the entire cosmos. It was formed when our universe was a mere 380,000 years old.
The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction. However, theoretically speaking, there is nothing to conclusively indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible.
The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there's the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions.
As it stands, the universe is the largest object that we are aware of. There is nothing larger, and everything we can smell, hear, taste, touch, or see is a part of it.