How Big Is Our Universe?

It began with a question. Not just any question, but the question. The one that children whisper under starry skies, the one that philosophers ponder in silence, and the one that scientists spend lifetimes trying to answer:

"How big is our universe?"

I was in the sixth grade when that question first gripped me. My science teacher had wheeled in an old TV and played a documentary about the cosmos. I remember staring, wide-eyed, as images of swirling galaxies, exploding stars, and the glowing tendrils of nebulae unfolded before me.

One phrase from that documentary never left me:
"The universe is not just big—it's getting bigger."

Bigger? I thought. How can something already endless be getting bigger?

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I went outside and laid on the cool grass in our backyard. Above me, the night sky stretched into a velvet sea, pinpricked by stars. Some were faint, barely visible. Others shone like diamonds. I stared so long that I began to feel small—smaller than small. Insignificant. But not in a bad way. In a way that felt honest.

As I grew older, my fascination deepened. I learned that the universe, as we know it, began with a singularity—an infinitely small, hot, and dense point—about 13.8 billion years ago. Then came the Big Bang, not an explosion, but an expansion. And since that moment, space itself has been stretching like a balloon being blown up from the inside.

But the more I learned, the stranger it became.

When we say the universe is "93 billion light-years" across, we’re only talking about the observable universe—the part we can see based on how long light has had to travel to us. But beyond that? There could be more. Much more. Maybe an infinite expanse. Maybe other universes entirely.

The mind reels at it. Because the universe isn’t expanding into anything. There’s no "edge" with a blank canvas beyond it. Instead, space itself is growing. Galaxies aren’t flying through space—they’re being carried apart by the expansion of space-time. It's not just vast—it's dynamic, mysterious, alive in its own way.

Still, for all the theories, simulations, and telescope images, no one knows how big it really is. Maybe it’s infinite. Maybe it's curved and loops back on itself like the surface of a globe. Or maybe it will one day collapse back in a cosmic reverse, a "Big Crunch." Or stretch into nothingness in a cold and distant end called the "Big Freeze."

But here's what moves me most: despite how small we are in the scale of things, we’re the only creatures—so far as we know—who even ask these questions.

We're the only ones who build observatories on mountaintops and launch telescopes like Hubble and James Webb to peer into the deep past. We look at ancient light from stars that died before humans ever walked the Earth and still we ask, What else is out there? How far does it go?

That’s not just science. That’s a kind of love. A yearning to understand where we come from, and what it all means.

There’s something poetic in the idea that the universe is always expanding—because aren’t we, too? We grow. We wonder. We reach beyond what we know.

I remember standing in a planetarium years later, watching a projection of the known universe zoom out from Earth to the Milky Way, then beyond to the cosmic web—a vast structure of galaxies linked like threads in a celestial spider’s web. It was beautiful. Terrifying. Holy.

A child nearby asked her dad, “Is that real?”

He replied, “As real as we can see. But there’s always more.”

That sentence hit me like gravity.

There’s always more.

More to see. More to learn. More mystery waiting in the dark between stars. More questions we haven't even thought to ask.

And so, the answer to "How big is our universe?" may never be final. It may always shift with discovery, always unfold with each passing moment. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the beauty of the universe isn’t in finding the edge, but in knowing that there might never be one.

Because when you gaze into a sky full of stars, and you let the silence speak, you realize something extraordinary:

We are not just in the universe.
The universe is in us.