Question: What is beyond space?

Hussain Jaffery answered on 7 Nov 2015:

This is a great question because no actually knows the answer!

Astrophysicists, cosmologists, and theoretical physicists who are scientists that study space, stars, and all of the ‘stuff’ out there in space using telescopes and theories from maths, are also very interested in answering this question.

The truth of the matter is, we can’t really see beyond space because we don’t know for certain if it even has an edge! Given measurements of how fast the galaxies in the part of the universe we can see, some scientists have proposed the idea that space goes on forever, to infinity. This is a universe where, after the Big Bang, and the creation of the stars and galaxies we can see today and after billions of years, the galaxies continue to move away from each other, and possibly even going faster as they do.

But what are moving into? Space that is being created as our universe expands.

Think of the universe as a balloon. If you draw two dots on a deflated balloon with a marker and then blow into it, the dots grow farther apart as more air is added into the balloon. The dots are like galaxies in our universe. Over time, the universe only continues its expansion.

What’s beyond our universe? We don’t know yet, and might not be able to, fully. But we can predict what’s possible using really advanced maths. Some scientists say there are many other universes, like a very large bunch of balloons – some growing, some shrinking, constantly popping in and out of existence. Others think there’s only one universe – ours – and that we may never know what lies at the very edge of space, because it keeps getting away from us faster than we can see it.

The farthest and also the brightest things that we can see, though, are what are called a quasars. This are probably super-massive black holes at the very edges of our universe that not only absorb light from their enormous gravity, but they also release light from there ‘sides’, which we can see from our telescopes!

Don’t even get me started on Dark Matter and Dark Energy!