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by crazydoggers 1972 days ago
That’s not known. This article refers to the observable universe which is bound by the speed of light.

Whether the universe is infinite or not is an open question. It might be finite but unbounded. Spacetime geometry is complicated.

1 comments

Neither the title nor the summary say anything about the "observable universe". They make broad claims beyond that. The detail of the article in no way mentions that there could very well be infinite duplicates of what we see out there beyond observable distance.
This is the first sentence in the lead paragraph:

>How dark is the sky, and what does that tell us about the number of galaxies in the visible universe?

Because this is an article that’s using the layman terminology. The scientists involved surely understand the difference. In fact read the Wikipedia article and you’ll see the old estimate of 2 trillion for the observable universe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe