Article Posted on : - Feb 04, 2011

A file photo by NASA.

LONDON (BNS): For decades, cosmologists have wondered about the actual size of the Universe. But, recently a series of scientific investigations have unraveled that mystery.

According to the study, which was conducted by the researchers at Oxford University and Imperial College, London, it would appear that the entire Universe, including both its visible and invisible components, is about 250 times than the visible cosmos alone is.

Researcher Mihran Vardanyan and his team came up with a new complex method of analysing all previous research they call the Bayesian method, the Daily Mail reports.

A main source of data they used was measuring the size of waves in the early universe that became frozen in the cosmic microwave background — or baryonic acoustic oscillations — using telescopes in space, the news report added.

They found that the most likely model is a tightly constrained curvature of the universe — which means it’s flat.

It’s also at least 250 times bigger than the 'Hubble volume', which is approximately the size of the visible universe.

"Using modern astronomers’ assumptions, which favour a flat universe, this gives 98 per cent probability that the universe is indeed flat. However, we also did this calculation starting from more relaxed initial assumptions, the probability changed to about 46 per cent, making a flat universe far less probable," Dr. Vardanyan was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.