The expansion of the universe is a fascinating and complex subject. One question that often arises is how fast the universe is expanding right now, and why it’s expanding. In this article we’ll answer those questions and more!
How fast is the Universe expanding from our point of view?
The Universe is expanding at a rate of 2.1% per billion years, which means that every second, the Universe expands 10 km/s faster than it did the second before. The term “kilometers per second” (km/s) can be simplified to “meters per second” (m/s). So if you take your car and drive 100 m/s, after 5 seconds you will have traveled 500 meters from where you started! And if you are traveling in a rocket ship that can travel at 50 km/s and go into space, how long would it take for them to reach another star?
Well let’s find out! A light year is the distance traveled by light in one Earth year (365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds). This means that if we could see something 1000 LY away from us, then in one year they would have moved 1 AU away from us. So what does this mean? Well because it takes 8 minutes 42 seconds for light from our sun to reach us on Earth – if someone were standing on Neptune looking back towards Earth with telescopes they could see all of our planets except Pluto because Pluto is beyond Neptune’s orbit! They would also see our moon but not Venus or Mars since those planets are closer than Neptune is!
The Universe is expanding at a rate of 2.1% per billion years.
The Universe is expanding at a rate of 2.1% per billion years. The speed at which the universe is expanding changes over time because of the effects of gravity. As long as there is matter in your universe, and you are using the same units throughout your calculations, you can use this formula:
- V = H/r
where V represents velocity (speed), r represents radius, and H represents Hubble constant (which is also called Hubble parameter). The Hubble constant describes how quickly galaxies are moving away from each other in our observable universe.
The Universe is expanding at a rate of 10 km/s per megaparsec (an astronomical unit).
The Universe is expanding at a rate of 10 km/s per megaparsec (an astronomical unit).
An astronomical unit is a distance of about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) from Earth to the Sun. A megaparsec, meanwhile, is a million parsecs—or 3.26 million light-years. That’s about 15 billion times as far away as Earth is from our Sun!
If the universe were only 3 billion years old, then it was expanding at a rate of 0.7% per year.
If the universe were only 3 billion years old, then it was expanding at a rate of 0.7% per year.
That means that if you were 10 meters away from me right now and we both started walking in opposite directions at 1 meter/second (1 m/s), then we’d finish walking apart after just over 6 hours, when our separation had grown to 100 meters. At this point, I would be moving away from you at some speed greater than 1 m/s while you would be moving away from me at some speed less than 1 m/s because Earth’s orbit around the sun means that your separation from us is always increasing by about 11 kilometers per second every 8 minutes or so.
Conclusion
From these figures, we can see that the Universe is expanding at a rate of around 2.1% per billion years. This may seem like a small number, but if you think about how long it takes for humans to evolve from apes into intelligent beings – it’s actually pretty fast!
