Post by Tiago on May 17, 2018 23:25:22 GMT
By Andrew Z. Colvin [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons
In this post I'll be calculating the diameter of the observable universe in kilometres...
Now, according to many sources - the diameter of the observable universe is 93 billion light-years.
If you don't know what a light-year is, in simple terms - it's the distance that light can travel in one year.
Since light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second (in a vacuum), we can say that in one year light can travel the distance calculated below:
1 minute = 60 seconds --> 300,000 kilometres x 60 = 18,000,000 kilometres (Light can travel 18 million kilometres in one minute)
1 minute x 60 = 1 hour --> 300,000 kilometres x 60 x 60 = 1,080,000,000 kilometres (Light can travel 1.08 billion kilometres in one hour)
1 hour x 24 = 1 day --> 1,080,000,000 kilometres x 24 = 25,920,000,000 kilometres (Light can travel nearly 26 billion kilometres in 1 day)
1 day x 365 = 1 year --> 25,920,000,000 kilometres x 365 = 9,460,800,000,000 kilometres (Light can travel almost 9.5 trillion kilometres in 1 year)
** Light can travel approximately 9.5 trillion kilometres in one year **
And since we've got this figure - we simply multiply it by 93 billion to get the diameter of the observable universe in kilometres...
This calculation goes as follows...
9,460,800,000,000 kilometres x 93,000,000,000
Which can be simplified to...
9.4608 x 10^12 x 93 x 10^9 kilometres
Giving us...
8.798544 x 10^23 kilometres
Which is equal to:
879,854,400,000,000,000,000,000 kilometres = 8.798544 x 10^23 kilometres
Let's try and put this into words...
1,000 = 1 thousand (10^3)
1,000,000 = 1 million (10^6)
1,000,000,000 = 1 billion (10^9)
1,000,000,000,000 = 1 trillion (10^12)
1,000,000,000,000,000 = 1 quadrillion (10^15)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 1 quintillion (10^18)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 1 sextillion (10^21)
Which means that the diameter of the observable universe is approximately:
879 sextillion, 854 quintillion, 400 quadrillion kilometres!!!
Cool links:
Big Numbers - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers
Big Numbers (2) - mathsvideos.net/big-numbers/