Monthly Archives: November 2007

Could cosmic inflation be a sign that our universe is embedded in a far vaster realm

You might not think that cosmologists could feel claustrophobic in a universe that is 46 billion light-years in radius and filled with sextillions of stars. But one of the emerging themes of 21st-century cosmology is that the known universe, the sum of all we can see, may just be a tiny region in the full extent of space. Various types of parallel universes that make up a grand “multiverse” often arise as side effects of cosmological theories. We have little hope of ever directly observing those other universes, though, because they are either too far away or somehow detached from our own universe.