True or false, The observable universe is the same size today as it was a few million years ago?

I don't get this question and also does this mean that as the universe expands parts of the universe are disappearing from our view forever?True or false, The observable universe is the same size today as it was a few million years ago?
False.聽 Every year we can see one more light year into the distance.


聽True or false, The observable universe is the same size today as it was a few million years ago?
As you can see by the variety of answers, this is a trick question.


1. A million years ago there weren't any people to observe anything.


2. The universe is expanding, but that doesn't mean we can actually observe stuff farther away.


3. The oldest ';stuff'; we can see is the cosmic microwave background. As the universe expands, the cosmic microwave background gets farther away so I would say over time the observable universe does increase.


4. Eventually, the universe is expected to expand faster than the speed of light, so the horizon will shrink again (stuff will disappear).


For now, I'm voting the answer is false because of the expansion of the universe.
It is expanding at an increasingly quicker pace and even the rate of acceleration is speeding up.





That is all true; however, another way asking the question would be to ask what it looks like from the outside. You can't answer that question, what is it expanding into? You can't meaningfully (logically) answer that either. It is not expanding into a dark ';space'; the totality of what there is includes the ';dark space';. So what did it look like before the big bang? The same as it looks just past the boarder of the expanding edge. Nothing. Like what you see behind you eyes. Not black space, nothing at all. No qualities what so ever.





With that definition of the WHOLE you can't really say the universe is getting larger. Larger compared to what? Could you say that IT is moving left or right, towards or away? Those have no meaning if they are not moving in relation to another ';something';





In the spirit of your question though, yes it is expanding and no it is not the same size as it was a few million years ago, it is not the same size as when you asked this question.
Both previous answers are partly correct. The universe is expanding. Light does travel farther in the millions of years, so we can see millions of light years farther, and the objects we are looking at are farther away.


But soon, the universe will expand so much due to dark energy, that distant objects we can see now will be beyond the observable horizon in a few billion years.


But I don't think you have to worry about that
Our observable horizon will keep expanding as more and more light from more and more distant points has had time to reach us. Over a few million years, the observable universe's horizon has expanded. So, false, the observable universe is not the same size today as it was a few million years ago. However, at those distances, we can't even guess what difference a few million light years distance is. When we say a quasar is 12 billion light years distant, (1) there's a margin of error as high as 50%; (2) that quasar has moved with the expansion of space, it's no longer there, it may be more like 40 billion LY away, and it wouldn't be a quasar anymore,it would have evolved into a galaxy of some sort maybe. As you probably know, the further things are apart, the faster they recede from each other. There is a distance where things are moving away from our point of view at greater than light speed, and those things we will never see and have never seen. As to those things already seen, once we are separated far enough through the expansion of space, they will disappear from view, according the the Hubble constant, which is something astronomers would like to nail down, but it is also simply an approximation. Right now I believe it stands at a recession speed of 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec (3.6 million LY) distance.
Not exactly. On the History Channel a few months ago they did a huge segment on the Universe. The big debate queuing the show was that the Universe was getting bigger. It is but it's not expanding from say the limits of space stretching. What is happening is our Universe is slowly expanding from with in. Solar Systems and Galaxies are getting further apart. Space is stretching from within. As far as disappearing from our view, no the stars that are ';disappearing'; are just dead. The stars we see in the sky each night, odds are they are already dead adn it just took that long for us to see their light on Earth.
false every second that we look in to space we can see farther the light travels at a constant rate so if you were 2 light years from earth and turned on a flash light pointed at earth for just 5 seconds it would take 2 years to reach earth and people on earth would see it for only 5 seconds so if some thing is 100,000,000 light years away it would take that long for us to see it the star light from a star is not what it truly is in the current time the star could be dead or changed into a red giant or dwarf star but if would take that time for us to see the change so if the edge of the universe is moving at the speed of light we will never see it no matter how long we look
NO





The universe is constantly expanding. Every single galaxy throughout space is moving away from us, it's not moving away from space but through space. The universe is infinite.
To be short, it is false! Our universe is expanding constantly.