Originally posted by josephw
I spent a little time trying to learn about the shape and size of the universe. It's rather complicated. I suppose I could take a month to study it further and try to grasp the astronomical language, but I would prefer to keep it simple.
It looks to me that the universe is about 15 billion light years thick and about 200 billion light years across. Like a ...[text shortened]... ake.
Can anyone give a simple explanation as to the consensus amongst astronomers about this?
Where did you get the 200 billion light year part? It if was that much different in one dimension than another there would be a vastly different reading of the WMAP data since there would be great temperature differences from say, up and down VS left to right. As it is, the WMAP shows a temperature that only deviates in parts per 10,000 or less and the latest maps tag it out to one part in 100,000. That says pretty clearly the universe is pretty well the same distance in all directions. The absolute size is up for grabs but we know since the universe expanded WAY faster than the speed of light (space can do that, relativity doesn't apply to the speed of space) and it is STILL expanding faster than c which suggests pretty clearly there are parts of the universe we can never see simply because light has not had a chance to get here yet and never will since the universe is in fact expanding past the speed of light. Best guess is our universe is about 50 odd billion LY across but spherical not pancake.
