What is at the end of the Universe?

My question is "what is at the end of the universe if it really does end?" because if the big
bang theory is correct then then when the whole universe was one atom or very small
what did it expand into because if there was nothing there it couldnt have expanded. For
example if you have a room and you say that the walls are the end of the universe then
you build on to the room to make it bigger (the universe expanding) there has to be room
on the other side of the wall for you to build into.
There is nothing called the end of the Universe. There are three possibilities of the shape of the
Universe.
First, the Universe might have what we call positive curvature like a sphere. In this case, the
Universe is called "closed" and it has a finite size but without a boundary, just like a balloon. In a
closed Universe, you could, in principle, fly a spaceship far enough in one direction and get back
to where you started from.
The second possibility is that the Universe is flat. This kind of Universe can be imagined by
cutting out a piece of a balloon material and stretching it with your hands. The surface of the
material is flat and not curved. You can expand and contract it by tugging on either end. Flat
Universes are infinite in extent and have no boundaries.
Finally, the Universe might be "open" or have negative curvature. Such Universes are also infinite
in spatial extent and have no boundaries.
Thus whatever be the shape of the Universe, there is nothing called a boundary and hence
nothing called the edge or end of the Universe.
Regarding the second question of expansion, remember that space exists only IN the Universe
and there is no meaning to the term "outside the Universe". What happens in expansion is that
the space itself is expanding. With respect to your room analogy, it is not that the walls of your
room are pushing against something but that the space in the room is expanding; there is nothing
to push against. Thus, when we talk of galaxies receding from us due to the expanion, it is not
that the galaxies are moving, but the space in between us and the galaxies is expanding.
Why is it difficult to understand the expansion of the universe?
One of the most frequently asked questions at Ask and Astronomer--and one of the most
infamously tough to answer--has to do with the expansion of the universe: what is at the end of
the universe? Because if the universe is expanding, it must be expanding into something, right?
No. A number of previous pages (see "related questions") address this question, but I would like
to stop for a minute to talk about why it is so tough for us to get our minds around this issue, and
why answers that are technically correct can still be unsatisfying.
Trying to understand the expansion of the universe is a bit of a paradox--because really
understanding it involves "giving up" on ever comprehending it in the same way that you
comprehend your everyday physical world. I might tell you to picture the universe as an
expanding raisin-cake or a four dimensional balloon (some favorite mental models), but it just isn't

possible to grasp "the universe" in the same intuitive way that you understand, say, the shape of a
ball in your hand.
That doesn't mean that it is impossible to understand the expansion of the universe, but it does
mean that, for most of us, that understanding will be of a different quality than what we're used
to--it will be grounded in mathematics rather than in physical experience.
I am very confused about things my science book says about the expanding universe.
Every book I have seen has defined the universe as "everything". If the universe is
expanding what is it expanding into? It would have to expand into even more universe. I
understand that the red spectrum indicates that things are moving away from us but that
is drifting not expanding, right? If you could help me to understand this, it would be
appreciated. Thank you for your time.
This is a very good question which is not at all easy to give a satisfactory answer to! The first time
I tried to write an answer to this, we got so many follow-up questions from people who were still
confused that I decided to try to answer it again, this time much more comprehensively. The long
explanation is below. However, if you just want a short answer, I'll say this: if the universe is
infinitely big, then the answer is simply that it isn't expanding into anything; instead, what is
happening is that every region of the universe, every distance between every pair of galaxies, is
being "stretched", but the overall size of the universe was infinitely big to begin with and
continues to remain infinitely big as time goes on, so the universe's size doesn't change, and
therefore it doesn't expand into anything. If, on the other hand, the universe has a finite size, then
it may be legitimate to claim that there is something "outside of the universe" that the universe is
expanding into. However, because we are, by definition, stuck within the space that makes up our
universe and have no way to observe anything outside of it, this ceases to be a question that can
be answered scientifically. So the answer in that case is that we really don't know what, if
anything, the universe is expanding into.
Now, for those of you who want a more comprehensive discussion:
Let me begin by saying that "expanding" isn't really the best word to describe what is happening
to the universe, although that is the word that is often used - a word choice which I think leads to
a lot of unnecessary confusion regarding what is already a difficult topic! A more accurate word
for what the universe is doing might be "stretching".
The difference between "expanding" and "stretching", for me at least, is that an "expanding
universe" conjures up an image where there is a bunch of galaxies floating through space, all of
which started at some center point and are now moving away from that point at very fast speeds.
Therefore, the collection of galaxies (which we call the "universe") is expanding, and it is certainly
fair to ask what it is expanding into.
The current theories of the universe, however, tell us that this is not the picture we should have in
mind at all. Instead, the galaxies are in some sense stationary - they do not move through space
the way that a ball moves through the air. The galaxies simply sit there. However, as time goes
on, the space between the galaxies "stretches", sort of like what happens when you take a sheet
of rubber and pull at it on both ends. Although the galaxies haven't moved through space at all,
they get farther away from each other as time goes on because the space in between them has
been stretched.
Of course, when we think of space in everyday life, we don't think of it as something which is
capable of stretching. Space, to us, just seems like something which is there, and which
everything else in the universe exists within. But according to Einstein's theory of general
relativity, space isn't really as simple as our common sense tells us. If we want to understand the

actual way that the universe functions, we need to find some way to incorporate Einstein's ideas
into our mental picture and imagine space as a more complicated entity which is capable of doing
things like "bending" and "stretching".
To help us imagine this, a lot of people have come up with analogies for the universe in which
space is represented by something more tangible. For example, there is the analogy with a sheet
of rubber (or sometimes a balloon) that I mentioned above. My favorite analogy, though, involves
imagining the universe as a gigantic blob of dough. Embedded in the dough are a bunch of
raisins, spread throughout. The dough represents space, and the raisins represent the galaxies.
(To the best of my knowledge, this analogy was originally proposed by Martin Gardner in his 1962
book Relativity for the Million.) We have no idea how big the dough is at this point - all we know is
that it is very big, and we, sitting on some raisin somewhere inside it, are so far away from the
"edge" that the edge can't possibly have any effect on us or on what we see.
Now, someone puts the dough in the oven and it begins to expand. The raisins move apart from
each other, but relative to the dough they don't move at all - the same particles of dough that start
off near a particular raisin will always be next to that raisin. That is what I meant when I said that
the galaxies aren't really moving through space as the universe expands - here, the raisins aren't
moving through the dough, but the distance between the raisins is still getting larger.
This new picture of the universe which I am asking you to imagine is, on a practical level, much
different from the old picture in which the galaxies are all moving through space away from some
point at the center. A lot of concepts and definitions that seem simple to us in the old picture are
much more complicated now. For example:
What is the distance between two galaxies?
In the old picture, this is an easy question to answer theoretically (though not necessarily in
practice!). Just get yourself a giant tape measure and clip it to a faraway galaxy, then come back
to our galaxy and hold on tight. As the galaxy moves away, it will pull on the tape measure, and
you will easily be able to read off the distance as the tape measure unwinds... one billion lightyears, one and half billion light-years, two billion light-years, etc.
In our new picture of the universe, however, with the raisins and the dough, the tape measure will
not unwind at all as the universe expands, because the galaxies are not actually moving with
respect to each other! Instead, it will read one billion light-years the whole time. You could be
perfectly justified in saying that the distance between the galaxies has not changed as time goes
on. When you bring the tape measure back in, however, you will notice something unusual; due
to the stretching of space, your tape measure will have stretched as well, and if you compare it to
an identical tape measure which you had sitting in your pocket the entire time, you will see that all
the tick marks on it are twice as far apart as they used to be. Using the tape measure from your
pocket as a reference, you would now say that the galaxy is two billion light-years away, even
though the first tape measure said it was one billion light-years away. As you can see, the
concept of "distance" in this new picture of the universe is somewhat more complicated than in
the old picture! It is unclear whether the universe as a whole is really "expanding" - all that we
really measure is a stretching of the space between each pair of galaxies. (Note that we might
have to have an "imaginary" tape measure whose atoms aren't actually being held together by
intermolecular forces in order for the scenario described above to actually take place as
described.)
(By the way, this analogy of the tape measure is pretty similar to what actually happens to light
when it travels between galaxies. When light is emitted from one galaxy and travels through
space to another galaxy, during its trip through space it also will be stretched, causing it to have a
longer wavelength and therefore causing its color to appear more towards the red end of the

spectrum. This is what leads us to see red shifted light when we look at faraway galaxies, and it is
measurements of this redshift that allow us to estimate the distances to these galaxies.)
Where is the center of the universe?
In the old picture, it is easy to say where the center of the universe is - it's the point in space that
all the galaxies are moving away from. In the new picture, though, this isn't so clear. Remember,
the galaxies aren't actually moving away from each other - they're sitting still! Let's go back to the
dough analogy - sure, you can imagine that even if the dough is really really big, it has some point
within it which is the geometric center. But this definition is not very useful. Since the dough
represents the space that we live in, we have no way to see "outside" of the dough to get a sense
of the entire shape and figure out where the center is. So if you are stuck inside the dough, and
have no way to see anything except the dough, and if you are so far from the "edge" of the dough
that you can't see it and it can't have any effect on you, then what difference do you notice
between the point where you're at and the point that is actually at the geometric center of the
entire blob of dough? The answer is that there is no difference, absolutely none. The concept of
the "center of the universe" loses all meaning, so we don't even think about it.
In fact, we can go a step further and imagine that the center isn't even there at all! How? Well,
what if instead of just being really really big, the dough were infinitely big - that is, you could walk
forever in a straight line and never reach a place where the dough ends. In that case, there really
would be no center of the universe - the only way you can define the center is to mark out the
edges and find the point that's equally in between all of them. So if the universe is infinitely big
and has no edges, then it also has no center, not even on a theoretical level.
What does the universe expand into?
Finally, we can return to the original question. In our old picture of the universe, the answer
would be simple, although very unsatisfying. The collection of galaxies that make up the universe
is moving through space; therefore, the universe is expanding into even more space than it
already encompassed. In our new picture, though, the galaxies are just raisins spread throughout
the dough - their presence is largely irrelevant to the question of the universe's expansion. What
we really care about is the dough, and whether or not it has a boundary.
If the dough does have a boundary, then it is legitimate to ask what is beyond the boundary that
the dough expands "into". But for our universe, that is a very complicated question to ask! The
boundary at the edge of the dough represents the "edge" of space. By definition, we exist within
space and have no way to leave it! So we don't think there is any way to observe or measure
what is beyond, unless it had some effect on us that we currently don't know about. It would be
really weird to imagine reaching the "end" of space. What would it look like, for example? These
are questions that we have no way to give a scientific answer to, so the simple answer is that we
don't know! All we do know is that based on our current understanding of theoretical cosmology,
the universe does not have a boundary - it is either infinite or it wraps around itself in some way.
Observations seem to agree with these predictions in the sense that if the universe does have a
boundary, we know that the boundary is so far away from us that we can't currently see it and it
doesn't have any effect on us.
If the universe is indeed infinite, then the simple answer to the original question is that the
universe doesn't have anything to expand into. Thinking about infinity is always complicated, but
a good analogy can be made with simple math. Imagine you have a list of numbers: 1, 2, 3, etc.,
all the way up to infinity. Then you multiply every number in this list by 2, so that you now have
2,4,6,etc., all the way up to infinity. The distance between adjacent number in your list has
"stretched" (it is now 2 instead of 1), but can you really say that the total extent of all your
numbers has "expanded"? You started off with numbers that went up to infinity, and you finished

with numbers that went up to infinity. So the total size is the same! If these numbers represent the
distances between galaxies in an infinite universe, then it is a good analogy for why the universe
does not necessarily expand even though it stretches.
Finally, I should point out that not everything in the universe is "stretching" or "expanding" in the
way that the spaces between faraway galaxies stretch. For example, you and I aren't expanding,
the Earth isn't expanding, the sun isn't expanding, and even the entire Milky Way galaxy isn't
expanding. That's because on these relatively small scales, the effect of the universe's stretching
is completely overwhelmed by other forces (i.e. the galaxy's gravity, the sun's gravity, the Earth's
gravity, and the atomic forces which hold people's bodies together). It is only when we look
across far enough distances in the universe that the effect of the universe's stretching becomes
noticeable above the effects of local gravity and other forces which tend to hold things together.
(That is why, in the analogy of the tape measure I discussed above, the tape measure that you
keep in your pocket does not get stretched, while the one that goes between two galaxies does
get stretched. I bet some people were wondering about that!)

How do we define distance in an expanding universe?

If we say that light from a distant galaxy took 10 billion years to reach earth (10 billion light
years from Earth), why isn't it true that the galaxy is actually much further away since
during that 10 billion year time since the light started its journey toward us, the galaxy has
continued to move still farther away?
If this has any truth, then galaxies which are farthest away and traveling close to the speed
of light away from us are almost twice the distance now (almost 28 billion light years away
if the universe is 14 billion years old) as they were when the light started its journey!
It is completely legitimate to say that the galaxy is farther than 10 billion light years away from
Earth now -- if you're using a particular definition of the "distance" to the galaxy. Unfortunately,
distance is one of those things that has an intuitive meaning in everyday life but is not so intuitive
in our expanding universe! Astronomers (and other people) are not always very clear about what
they mean when they talk about an object's "distance", leading to a lot of confusion about this
topic. Read on for a further explanation.
First of all, the expansion of the universe doesn't consist of galaxies moving through some static
space, but rather the "stretching" of the space itself. The light is moving through this expanding
space and has to travel the initial distance plus whatever distance is added due to the universe's
expansion during the course of the journey. It's like running on a racetrack that is being stretched
-- if the racetrack started off 100 meters long but got stretched to a final length of 400 meters as
you were running from start to finish, then the total distance you've run is more than 100 meters.
In fact, when you talk about the "distance" between the start and finish lines in this racetrack, you
might mean several different things:
(1) You could mean 100 meters, since that's the distance when you start running; it's also what
the markings on the track say the distance is.

(2) You could mean 400 meters, since that's the distance between start and finish at the moment
you reach the finish line.
(3) You could mean the actual distance you've run, which is more than 100 meters (since the
track stretches while you're running on it), but less than 400 meters (since some of the stretching
happens on parts of the track you've already passed through).
[Thanks to a reader for pointing out the difference between (2) and (3) -- in my first attempt at
answering this question I did not make any distinction between them!]
You can see from the above example that when astronomers talk about the "distance" to a
faraway galaxy, there are several things they might mean! Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial has a
comprehensive technical discussion of the different types of distances that astronomers use
(though it may be a bit hard to understand if you jump into it without reading the earlier parts of
his tutorial first) -- some of these distances are similar to those discussed above for the racetrack,
while others are completely different. He also has some answers posted to questions that are
similar to the one you are asking.
If we somehow know that "light from a distant galaxy took 10 billion years to reach Earth", as your
question posits, then clearly, if we are using definition #3 we would say that the distance to the
galaxy is 10 billion light years. However, if we are using definition #1 we would say that the
distance to the galaxy is less than 10 billion light years (i.e. it was closer than 10 billion light years
when the light was emitted), and if we are using definition #2 we would say that the distance to
the galaxy is greater than 10 billion light years (i.e. it is greater than 10 billion light years right
now, when the light is received by us).
As you can see, saying that a galaxy is "10 billion light years away" is an ambiguous statement! It
doesn't really mean much unless you also specify what definition of distance you are using. And
while definition #2 is probably the one that corresponds most closely to your intuitive feeling for
what "distance" is, in astronomy that is not always the best definition! After all, the light that
travels from a faraway galaxy to us is our only source of information about that galaxy, so we
might care a little more about the physical distance that the light has traveled (definition #3) than
how far away the galaxy is now (definition #2), since how far away the galaxy is now has no
bearing on what we see when we look at the galaxy.
All the definitions of distance discussed here suffer from a bit of a practical problem, though. In
order to use astronomical measurements to actually calculate any of these distances to a
particular galaxy, we need to know something about the history of the universe's expansion (in
other words, how did the racetrack stretch as a function of time?). Different models of the
universe's expansion give different numbers for the distance to the galaxy, and although recent
measurements (in particular those of the WMAP satellite) are helping us learn more about how
the universe expands, we still don't know all the details.
Therefore, the most common measurement of distance that astronomers use for faraway galaxies
is a lot simpler and less informative than the definitions of distance discussed above, but it is
much easier to measure! This distance measurement is known as the redshift of a faraway
galaxy. Astronomers take advantage of the fact that as light travels through the expanding
universe, the light itself gets stretched by the same factor that the universe does, causing its
wavelength to increase and its color to change and become more towards the red end of the
spectrum. The red shift of the light refers to the amount by which it has been stretched and is
basically a measurement of how much the universe has expanded during the light's trip from the
faraway galaxy to us.

Astronomers can measure the wavelength of light that we receive on Earth, and they can also
usually figure out what wavelength the light had when it was emitted, based on a knowledge of
the chemical processes involved in the light's production (for some information on how this is
done, see our answer to a previous question). Therefore, they can easily calculate the redshift for
almost any faraway object.
In the example of the racetrack discussed above, the track has expanded by a factor of 4 (from
100 meters to 400 meters). Astronomers would say that the redshift in this case is 3 (the redshift
is defined as "one less than the factor by which the universe has expanded", just so it works out
that if there is no expansion at all, the redshift will be zero). If you were running on the racetrack
and your body behaved like light did, you would reach the finish line and find that your body was
4 times bigger than it was when you started out!
Redshift is not a "traditional" measure of distance in the sense that we are used to. Standing at
the finish line and saying that the starting line is at a redshift of 3 doesn't tell us anything about
how big the track is or how far you just ran. (That's probably the reason that science journalists
almost never use redshift to describe distances even though it's what astronomers use all the
time -- it's not something that readers can intuitively connect with.) However, there is some
meaning to the concept -- in an expanding universe, objects with larger redshifts are farther away.
So if we measure one galaxy to have a redshift of 3 and another to have a redshift of 3.5, we
might not have any idea how long it would take us to get to either of them in a spaceship, but at
least we can say which one we could get to faster!