I recently read an article from a popular astronomy website called Universe Today. It stated that: “…the CMB [cosmic microwave background radiation] is visible at a distance of 13.8 billion light years in all directions from Earth, leading scientists to determine that this is the true age of the Universe. “ This statement isn’t quite correct.… Continue reading Understanding Cosmic Distances
Updated 1 February 2026 Although the Universe may be infinite in extent, in the generally accepted Big Bang cosmology we are only able to see a small fraction of it. We call this small fraction we can see the observable universe. Outside the boundary of the observable universe lies the unobservable universe - a region… Continue reading The Observable Universe and Its Horizons
This post has now been superseded by a more detailed post Measuring Distances in Cosmology ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I recently read an article on the popular astronomy website site Universe Today. It stated that ‘…the CMB [cosmic microwave background radiation] is visible at a distance of 13.8 billion light years in all directions from Earth, leading scientists… Continue reading Distances in Cosmology
I offered recently to write an article for my local astronomy society on the discovery of dark energy. It is an expanded version of the blog post I wrote on the topic last year and, at over 3000 words, it is longer than my usual posts. I thought it would be of interest to many… Continue reading Dark energy an unexpected finding
In a previous post I talked about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a large telescope being built in Chile which will spend 90% of its time surveying most of the sky a total of 1000 times over a 10 year period (in the remaining 10% it will revisit areas of specific interest). In this… Continue reading Surveying the Cosmos – Part II
Explaining Science 