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Distance in space


stopandthink

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I'm not a specialist in cosmology so i won't be surprised if most of this is incorrect.

 

Everything we can see, in the universe, travels from point A to B, in waves.

So i know when i look at the sun, I'm seeing it how it was 8 minutes ago. But when we look through a powerful telescope we can see nebula's and galaxies further away from us in space, whose waves are just arriving from a long trip through space. And just like the sun we can observe them how they once looked. But since space is expanding we must also take into consideration that the light took longer because new space was forming as it traveled. Making it cover more distance but also having more distance to cover ahead towards it's destination. I'm not sure how much new space is formed per light year, but i presume it's not much. Anyway taking all this into consideration i can now assume that what i'm looking at are photons ,from galaxies in the past, that were once way closer, but in reality they are actually further away in space.

My question is how do cosmologist, physicist, etc.. calculate a "finite" observable universe when space is probably bigger than what we think it is? If it's measured by observation then all were doing is measuring the past.

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