New measurement gives size of universe

BOZEMAN, Mont., May 18 (UPI) -- U.S. cosmologists studying patterns in the "afterglow" of the Big Bang have calculated the universe is at least 78 billion light-years across.

The discovery also rules out earlier suggestions the universe could be smaller because it is wrapped around itself, said scientists at Montana State University. A recent suggestion that the cosmos could be shaped like a soccer ball, for example, would have meant the universe is 60 billion light-years across.

If the universe were such a shape, its space could be wrapped in on itself, like the video game "Pac-Man," where characters disappear off one side of the screen instantly reappear on the other. If that were the case, light from a distant object would be able to reach Earth along more than one path, just as it is possible to travel from the North Pole to the South Pole along any number of different straight paths around Earth's curved surface. So astronomers should be able to see light from the same object arriving from apparently different directions.

The team analyzed data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which detects microwave radiation from just 379,000 years after the universe began. If light from the same object was arriving from different directions, the researchers calculated this should produce circular patterns of hot and cold spots in the radiation. However, no such discovery was made.