Is the Universe really infinite or just really big?
We have observations that say that the radius of curvature of the Universe is bigger than 70 billion light years. But the observations allow for either a positive or negative curvature, and this range includes the flat Universe with infinite radius of curvature. The negatively curved space is also infinite in volume even though it is curved. So we know empirically that the volume of the Universe is more than 20 times bigger than volume of the observable Universe. Since we can only look at small piece of an object that has a large radius of curvature, it looks flat. The simplest mathematical model for computing the observed properties of the Universe is then flat Euclidean space. This model is infinite, but what we know about the Universe is that it is really big. Back to top. How can the oldest stars in the Universe be older than the Universe? Of course the Universe has to be older than the oldest stars in it. So this question basically asks: which estimate is wrong – • The age of the
