What lies beyond the universe?

The farthest reaches of the visible universe, also referred to as the known universe, are located approximately 45 billion light years from us. These are early constellations and stars, and their motion away from us is accelerating. This distance represents every possible direction from our galaxy.

However, you have to acknowledge that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, which implies that we are limited to seeing only objects that are 13.8 billion light years away. This means that we live in a universe that is roughly 13.8 billion years old.

Astrophysicists have explained this by proposing that the universe expanded to roughly half its current size in the first few seconds of its existence. This implies that, by default, the universe's original expansion happened at a speed far faster than light, going from zero to 31 billion light years in size in a matter of seconds.

Indeed, could the known galaxy population exceed 45 billion light years?

We are in the literal infancy of such discovery, and our ability to "see" these great distances and determine the distances to the most distant objects depends on our comprehension of the red shift and the precision of the instruments we use to measure these distances.

There is also the theory of the "multi-verse," which holds that there are an infinite number of universes and that ours is just one. The math behind this theory is what confounds those who would prefer to rule out the possibility of such a thing.

The nature of what lies beyond the universe is unknown and speculative. Current scientific understanding doesn't provide information about what, if anything, exists beyond the observable universe.