WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF OUR UNIVERSE?

I guess this is good news.  Hawaiian Airlines merged with Alaska Air.  More specifically, Alaska purchased Hawaiian for $1.9 billion.  We recently have been traveling a lot on both.  United Air seems to have backtracked in many ways the past few years.  Even though my loyalty program is with them, the company has so decimated the utility of using miles that it doesn't matter anymore.  In any case, when you travel in business or first class, you can always use the executive lounge of that airline.

One more bit of news.  Have you noticed that Israel is killing and maiming Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon with pagers?  

• Yes, this is that small device you use to page people.  
• Apparently, what happened is that mobile phones can be tracked, so they were discarded by the Hezbollah and replaced by pagers.  You cannot talk on them.  These devices can only text a message.  
• The Hezbollah ordered 5,000 pagers from a Taiwanese firm, Gold Apollo.  
• 
  But Israel operatives learned about this purchase and found a way to insert a board with a 3-gram explosive into the pager.  Gold Apollo said whatever happened occurred in Europe where there is a company licensed to assemble and sell the pager, model AR904, and Gold Apollo was not directly involved.
• 
  Once in Hezbollah fighter hands, a code can be send to explode the "bomb."  So yesterday, that code was sent, killing 9 of them and wounding 3,000.
• Note that this is not occurring in the Gaza Strip, but Lebanon.  The Hezbollah had on October 6 of last year, the day before the Hamas attack, lobbed a missile barrage into Israel, and regularly has repeated this since then.

Rather than read my posting, you might find it more entertaining to view a 3 minute 42 second You Tube explanation about the shape of the universe.  Still confused?  Then try this 3-hour long exposition:  what is the real shape of the our universe and other fascinating facts.  Still not sure?  Well, let me try.

Let's start by exploding dynamite.  Surely, the outer surface of the particles must be a sphere.  In outer space, happened only once so far, but in 2017, astronomers confirmed that when two neutron stars collided 140 million light-years away, there was a violent explosion, and the outer surface was a perfect sphere.  However, astrophysicist were totally surprised with this outcome, for there is almost unanimity that the result of the Big Bang explosion must be a universe that is either flat or Euclidian, a scientific term for curved.

Let me start with Wikipedia on the shape of the universe.  How can something so simple be so difficult to comprehend?

This article possibly contains original research.  (November 2020)

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.  (July 2023)

• 
  The shape has local and global geometry.
• Locally, defined by the extent of curvature.
• Global is characterized by its topology which can't be measured.
• Not sure what either one means.  Read yourself just the first paragraph, and nothing will make sense.  Guaranteed.
• In the second paragraph:  current observational evidence imply that the observable universe is SPATIALLY FLAT to within a 0.4% of the error of the curvature density parameter.
• So to repeat, these are the possible shapes of our universe.

That omega symbol represents density parameter.  Most space scientist believe that the density parameter is one, meaning a flat universe.  Why?  Because decades of astronomical findings say it is one.  

Now it gets even more confusing, for this flat universe is in a 3-dimensional sheet of paper.  But isn't a sheet of paper in 2 dimensions?  Maybe this is where my thinking goes awry.  Worse, string theory can be understood to predict that there are MORE than three spatial dimensions.  The other possibility that Wikipedia mentions is "that the observable universe is a four-dimensional subspace of a higher dimensional space." In other words, the observable universe is a thin slice of something bigger, and I don't know if the thickness of that slice is 0, or something greater than 0.  As abstruse as something so simple as the shape of the universe might be, one day I'll go out on a limb and try to explain string theory.

So I'm confused.  To bring order to space.  Let me try this.  If you could travel at the speed of light, which you can't, but as photons do:

• They travel from Earth to the Moon in about a second.
• To the Sun in 8 minutes.
• 40 minutes to Jupiter.
• 4.2 years to Proxima Centauri, the closest star.
• 
  From one end of our Milky Way Galaxy to the other?  100,000 years.
• Well, in 2018 this publication, Space.com, said the answer is 200,000 light years,  

• 
  Discoverer in 2020 also said 200,000 light years. I guess the field is still developing, for I still see 100,000 light years in some recent publications.  Also says that our Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will crash into each other in 4 billion years.
• From one end of our universe to the other, it will take 46 billion years.  Remember, this going at the speed of light, and our universe is less than 14 billion years old?  How can this be?

• 
  Popular Mechanics speculates that the end of the universe will occur in about 100 trillion years.  So imagine how long it has been from the original Big Bang.  The universe will go on for more than 7000 times that period.  Watch this.  The Big Chill will be completely dark, sort of like my life when I die.

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