Many people have heard that the diameter of the visible Universe is about 93–94 billion light years and have seen pictures depicting our Universe in the form of a sphere just like you see on the screen now. At the same time, most people have a logical question, what is outside this sphere? Let’s look into this question together.
At the moment, there is no consensus in the scientific community about whether the Universe is really infinite or whether it has limits in space and volume. However, there are several dominant theories about this and we can consider the most plausible of them.
As I said, based on a lot of research, scientists assume that the universe is either infinite or just very big. To decide between these two options, astronomers look at the curvature of space-time on the scale of the entire universe. On such a large scale, it tells researchers about the very shape of our Universe: whether it is an infinite plane, sphere or torus. To be truly infinite, the Universe at a minimum must be geometrically flat, and therefore have zero curvature.
Current observations and measurements of the curvature of the Universe show that it is 99.6% flat. The missing 0.4% are due to possible measurement errors. However, this is not enough to say that the Universe is infinite. Even in the case of a flat Universe, space does not necessarily have to be…
