The Observable Universe

Universe exploration with telescopes has a big flaw: light only travels so far. We can't look as far as we'd like to because light is traveling too slowly to catch the things moving away from us with a telescope.

However, this doesn't mean we haven't already explored incredibly far into space already. We can see 46.5 billion light years into space! (For those of you who don't know what a light year is, light is fast enough to loop the earth about 6 times in one second. Now try to imagine light traveling at that speed for 46.5 billion years. Whew!

There are an estimated 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in our universe, and possibly up to one septillion stars - mind you, that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. So, the light problem didn't exactly pose a big problem to astronomers. In fact, it was actually a boost to their morale to know that the universe was so huge, and that they have possibly the most interesting job in the planet. As a conclusion to this essay, light can only travel so far, but the universe is still enormous and thrilling to study.