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Ritchie,
There are many, many questions about the origins of our Universe.
The Big Bang is the most widely accepted theory about its origins. However, there are other possibilities e.g. we live in a local bubble of which there are an infinity of such bubbles in the Universe.
Is the observable universe basically our whole Universe or is the observable universe only a small fraction of the whole Universe?
For the sake of argument, let us assume that the Universe is expanding as per the Big Bang. An analogy that can be used for the Big Bang is that energy and matter formed in an inflated space as if on the surface of a blown up balloon. Every point will appear to be receding from every other point on this surface. It would be impossible to set a point of origin as all objects are on a surface with no path to the actual point of origin. The origin is not part of our observable Universe.
Although 13.7 billion years old, the observable Universe is currently 46.5 billion light years in any direction due to the expansion of space. Increasingly, many objects have now passed beyond our event horizon, at which point they no longer communicate any information to us (e.g. light energy) . At the event horizon, space is expanding so rapidly that objects are receding away from us faster than the speed of light.
Regards, Rob
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