The Cosmic Microwave Background is 13.7 billion years old, yet is currently located at a distance of 46.5 billion light-years. It was emitted when the Universe was around 380,000 years old, the cosmological redshift of this Cosmic Microwave Background is approximately z = 1100, meaning the Universe has expanded 1100 times in size since what we can detect, was emitted. We see these figures all the time.
But what about the Gravity Wave Background emitted at the very instant of the Big Bang, or the Neutrino Background one second later? If we can ever detect the very first gravitational wave of the Big Bang, how much further is the radius of our Detectable Universe pushed outward?
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyI haven’t had my coffee yet, so I’m not going to try formulating the equation because I’ll get it wrong, but given that you have all the factors, you should be able to do some quick math and get a good estimate. Assuming expansion is constant, anyway. It’s not, but you could at least get an upper and lower bound.
Not really, exponential expansion baffles my brain.
For example, when I hear that “after Inflation, the Visible Universe was the size of an orange”… and I don’t get it, I can’t quite grasp it, I would have imagined that the Visible Universe after Inflation would have been a hundred million lightyears across.How the light emitted from opposite ends of the diameter of an orange took 13.8 billion years to get to us in the center… or… something like that, with a cosmological redshift of z = (10)^16… I guess?