Observable universe

Visualization of the observable universe. The scale is such that the fine grains represent collections of large numbers of superclusters. The Virgo Supercluster—home of Milky Way—is marked at the center, but is too small to be seen.

### Diameter

8.8×1026 m or 880 Ym (28.5 Gpc or 93 Gly)

### Density (of total energy)

9.9×10−27 kg/m3 [[equivalent to 6 protons per cubic meter of space)

### Contents

Ordinary (baryonic) matter (4.9%)Dark matter (26.8%)Dark energy (68.3%)

The **observable universe** is a ball-shaped region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time; the electromagnetic radiation from these objects has had time to reach the Solar System and Earth since the beginning of the cosmological expansion. Initially, it was estimated that there may be 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. That number was reduced in 2021 to only several hundred billion based on data from *New Horizons*. Assuming the universe is isotropic, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is roughly the same in every direction. That is, the observable universe is a spherical region centered on the observer. Every location in the universe has its own observable universe, which may or may not overlap with the one centered on Earth.

The word *observable* in this sense does not refer to the capability of modern technology to detect light or other information from an object, or whether there is anything to be detected. It refers to the physical limit created by the speed of light itself. No signal can travel faster than light. Hence there is a maximum distance, called the particle horizon, beyond which nothing can be detected, as the signals could not have reached us yet. Sometimes astrophysicists distinguish between the observable universe and the *visible* universe. The former includes signals since the end of the inflationary epoch, while the latter includes only signals emitted since recombination.

According to calculations, the current comoving distance to particles from which the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) was emitted, which represents the radius of the visible universe, is about 14.0 billion parsecs (about 45.7 billion light-years). The comoving distance to the edge of the observable universe is about 14.3 billion parsecs (about 46.6 billion light-years), about 2% larger. The radius of the observable universe is therefore estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years. Using the critical density and the diameter of the observable universe, the total mass of ordinary matter in the universe can be calculated to be about 1.5×1053 kg. In November 2018, astronomers reported that extragalactic background light (EBL) amounted to 4×1084 photons.

As the universe's expansion is accelerating, all currently observable objects, outside the local supercluster, will eventually appear to freeze in time, while emitting progressively redder and fainter light. For instance, objects with the current redshift *z* from 5 to 10 will only be observable up to an age of 4–6 billion years. In addition, light emitted by objects currently situated beyond a certain comoving distance (currently about 19 billion parsecs) will never reach Earth.

## Overview

The universe's size is unknown, and it may be infinite in extent. Some parts of the universe are too far away for the light emitted since the Big Bang to have had enough time to reach Earth or space-based instruments, and therefore lie outside the observable universe. In the future, light from distant galaxies will have had more time to travel, so one might expect that additional regions will become observable. Owing to Hubble's law, regions sufficiently distant from Earth are expanding away from it faster than the speed of light. The expansion rate appears to be accelerating owing to dark energy.

Assuming dark energy remains constant (an unchanging cosmological constant) so that the expansion rate of the universe continues to accelerate, there is a "future visibility limit" beyond which objects will never enter the observable universe at any time in the future because light emitted by objects outside that limit could never reach the Earth. Note that, because the Hubble parameter is decreasing with time, there can be cases where a galaxy that is receding from Earth only slightly faster than light emits a signal that eventually reaches Earth. This future visibility limit is calculated at a comoving distance of 19 billion parsecs (62 billion light-years), assuming the universe will keep expanding forever, which implies the number of galaxies that can ever be theoretically observed in the infinite future is only larger than the number currently observable by a factor of 2.36 (ignoring redshift effects).

In principle, more galaxies will become observable in the future; in practice, an increasing number of galaxies will become extremely redshifted due to ongoing expansion, so much so that they will seem to disappear from view and become invisible. A galaxy at a given comoving distance is defined to lie within the "observable universe" if we can receive signals emitted by the galaxy at any age in its history, say, a signal sent from the galaxy only 500 million years after the Big Bang. Because of the universe's expansion, there may be some later age at which a signal sent from the same galaxy can never reach the Earth at any point in the infinite future, so, for example, we might never see what the galaxy looked like 10 billion years after the Big Bang, even though it remains at the same comoving distance less than that of the observable universe.

This can be used to define a type of cosmic event horizon whose distance from the Earth changes over time. For example, the current distance to this horizon is about 16 billion light-years, meaning that a signal from an event happening at present can eventually reach the Earth if the event is less than 16 billion light-years away, but the signal will never reach the Earth if the event is further away.

The space before this cosmic event horizon can be called "reachable universe", that is all galaxies closer than that could be reached if we left today; all galaxies beyond that are unreachable. Simple observation will show the future visibility limit (62 billion light-years) is exactly equal to the reachable limit (16 billion light-years) added to the current visibility limit (46 billion light-years).