When you look up at the night sky, it can feel like the universe is a big blanket of stars above you. But unlike a blanket, the universe doesn’t have corners and edges. Far beyond what humans can see, the universe keeps going. As far as humans know, it never stops.
When I saw your question, I went straight to my friend Michael Allen, senior instructor of physics and astronomy at Washington State University.
The universe is bigger than the biggest thing you’ve ever seen. It’s bigger than the biggest thing this cat can imagine. It’s so big that even your question has more than one very big answer.
Allen explained that you can think of the universe kind of like a rubber band. If you look at a rubber band’s flat surface, you can see it has no beginning and no end. It keeps going around and around in a loop.
Imagine you drew dots on that rubber band. If you pull on the rubber band, what happens? The rubber band stretches, and the dots move further apart. The universe is like that. The distance between all its galaxies, planets, and stars is stretching all the time, like dots on a rubber band. It never ends, but it’s also constantly expanding.
Scientists don’t think there is a true edge of the universe. But there’s an end to what humans can see of the universe. This is called the edge of the observable universe. It’s the farthest we can see, based on how we get information from light.