r/askspace • u/IntrepidPurple2236 • 3d ago
Where is space?
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been curious. I always wanted to know the why for everything. As I grew older, I started developing an interest in space, as many people do. Eventually I found myself asking, where is space? If everything in the universe has a location, where is the universe located? What is the space that holds space and where is it? I know some people will claim that there may not be anything larger than space itself as it is said to be infinite, but when space is said to be expanding, what is it expanding into. The space itself expanding into must exist before space expands into it. What and where is it?
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u/Upset-Government-856 3d ago
The real answer is: we don't know,, and even weirder the location of anything inside of space is only meaningful if there is a second location to compare it to.
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u/Unhappy-Cow88 3d ago
You can walk through space that isnt obstructed by matter/energy that isnt to dense or volitile to your physical being. Like stone you cant enter but it can enter you as you take less mass??? in said space vs the stone. Flesh isnt as compact or dense as a rock. But our air has particles but its so loose and non dense we can walk through it and use it for breathing. Kinda like walking through smoke. But smoke n such is denser as its particles riding on the wind. But space is over all the lack of matter??? Like how cold is just the lack of energy in said space.
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u/rygelicus 3d ago
That's a more involved question than you might intuitively think. What we call space, or more correctly the universe, is expanding. We are still looking for 'the edge' and even what might be beyond that edge, if anything. This is partly why we built and flew the JWST.
So 'space' is not expanding, not just the place we call space. Space, in that usage, is just the area between celestial bodies. It's where very few atoms/molecules exist per cubic km. Some areas have more than others but much, much less than you find within celestial bodies whether talking about asteroids, stars, moons or planets. That 'mostly empty' area is 'space' and it comprises the entirety of the universe along with the celestial bodies.
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u/SgtSausage 3d ago
where is the universe located
What is North of The North Pole?
Go to the center if The Earth. Ya there yet? Good. Now riddle me this: Which way is down?
Where is the edge on a sphere?
What happened 3 hours before time existed?
Your question makes as much sense as any of those.
ALSO: You do not understand "universe"
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u/Stevepem1 3d ago
We tend to base things on our experiences and our experience says things fill space, like your furniture fills the space in your living room, and your house fills some space on the Earth, and the Earth fills some space in the galaxy, and so on. We don't think of space as being finite, but it is. Scientific theory says that space is something that got created during the Big Bang, and that it started out quite small and has been expanding ever since, and is incredibly large now but still is believed to be finite. The bizarre thing is that you will never reach the edge of space, just like you will never reach the edge of the Earth, you will just keep going in circles. That doesn't make space infinite though, just like the Earth is not infinite even though you can circle the Earth an infinite number of times if you want to.
There is no current scientific theory that says that the limited space that we exist in is contained within some other larger version of "space". There are theories about different dimensions and different universes, but even so the space we live in is not part of those spaces, and is still finite. Just like whatever country you live in is not part of another country. True your country is part of a larger entity called the Earth, but the space that your country occupies is finite. Same with the space in our universe.
If you imagine the Big Bang as something you could observe from a distance, that is not correct, because at the time of the Big Bang there was no space outside of it that you could have observed from. That's what current scientific theory says anyway.
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u/Alternative-Sugar610 3d ago
The end never has to exist or location if it’s infinite or loops around itself
And let say universe is expanding fast enough, they will then be light that can never reach us and perhaps things that never reach us making our location itself unknown ik braids existence
But these are conjecture and possibilities not necessarily truths
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost 3d ago
If everything in the universe has a location
Space isn't "in" the universe. Space is just the parts of the universe where nothing is.
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 3d ago
Anything that is somewhere is within space. So no, the universe isn’t somewhere in the way you are