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Post by mikeck on Oct 15, 2016 17:50:15 GMT
Ok, so if we look at an object 13,000,000,000 ly away that means we are seen that object as it appeared 13 billion years ago. When we do that we are actually seeing light that is traveling along the fabric of space itself. assuming the "big bang" occurred 15 billion years ago, and of the fabric of space itself all emanated from the big bang from a central point ... If we could see 15,000,000,000 ly away would we see the big bang itself? And would we see it in any direction in which we looked? if so does that not show that the universe itself is curved and not a plane ?
let me know if I am simply misunderstanding the issue or part of it as well
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Post by argonbalt on Oct 15, 2016 20:17:46 GMT
In short
We do see the Big-bang, sort of. What people mean when they say "comic microwave background radiation" is essentially big-bang after party. It is the remaining energy speeding outward. The point it happened is so far away that the light has been stretched into microwaves, not to mention that the initial bang itself did not really have "light" as photons as a particle did not exist yet, it took the universe 3-400,000 odd years just to cool enough for regular atoms to form. So in truth you could never really "see" the big bang anymore than you could have memories of being a clump of cells in your mothers womb, "you" did not really stat living independently until you were "born", and the universe we can observe did not really exist until it cooled.
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erin
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Post by erin on Oct 15, 2016 20:53:39 GMT
As I understand it, there is no real center of the universe; the Big Bang did not take place at only one point from which all the rest of the Universe emanated. Rather, the Big Bang occurred at all points in spacetime at once, but because information travels at lightspeed, we can only see information that could have reached us at lightspeed since the beginning of time (so 13 billion light-years). This means that we could hypothetically see the Big Bang, but... The reason we can't see the Big Bang actually has nothing to do with the curvature of spacetime, and everything to do with two points: 1. There's too much matter blocking the view between the Big Bang and us.The earliest Universe was extremely, incredibly dense. It was also extremely hot, which means it should have been glowing, right? But because it was so dense, it was actually impossible for anything to be "bright". When the first matter came into existence, the free-flying electrons quickly absorbed all existing photons, and any photons that were re-radiated would be absorbed again by other matter. Because the Big Bang happened at all points in spacetime, we "see" the Universe 13 billion LY away exactly as it was then, but we cannot actually see it -- because at the time, those points in space were occupied by a dense, "dark" soup of matter completely opaque to all light. Eventually, spacetime expanded enough that light particles could be emitted into space for long enough distances and times that the earliest matter could cool down enough to combine into neutral hydrogen, binding the universe's electrons in tight orbitals so they suddenly could not intercept so many photons as before. When this happened about 378,000 years after the Big Bang -- in an event known as recombination -- light was able to travel freely in the Universe for the first time, and the entire sky would have glowed a uniform orange in the visible spectrum, the blackbody wavelength for the hydrogen recombination temperature of 4000K. This first "shining" of the universe is known as the photon decoupling. So why doesn't the sky glow orange today anymore? Well... 2. The constant expansion of spacetime since the Big Bang means that energy/photons from it has been stretched (redshifted) into longer, weaker wavelengths which we can no longer observe except as the piddling cosmic microwave background.The CMB is often touted as a window into the early Universe and the conditions of the Big Bang because it is the only light we can see that comes "directly" from the Big Bang, or rather, from the end time of the opaque wall of matter that existed directly after the Big Bang before space in that place had time to expand further. But because that light has been traveling for 13 billion light-years, and space is constantly expanding, all photons since that time have become extremely stretched, directly reducing their energy. So empty space appears black, except for some faint emissions in a region of the microwave spectrum. tl;dr we can actually "see" the Big Bang in a sense or at least its direct aftereffect we know as the CMB, but it is not visible to human eyes because of redshift. There is no central point of the universe and we do not see the central point wrapping around the sky when we look back 13 billion LY, but we can still see the CMB because the Big Bang happened everywhere in the Universe at once.
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Kahl'Zun
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Post by Kahl'Zun on Oct 16, 2016 2:21:12 GMT
What is interesting, and should cook your bacon the more you think about it, is that the CMB is not uniform. For some reason noone really understands, the expansion or "recombination" or whatnot, did not happen everywhere simultaneously, which is (perhaps) why matter exists as clumps such as stars and planets instead of being a universal thin soup, which is what you'd expect for a evenly cooling gas with absolutely no external factors
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erin
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Post by erin on Oct 16, 2016 2:39:00 GMT
It's certainly a problem in terms of explaining the mechanisms behind it in specific, but I dunno if I'd say it cooks my bacon per se. It's my understanding that random motions of particles due to uncertainty/superpositioning/wavefunction collapse/however it's called will tend to produce unique states within finite volumes of space, and we are limited to observing our finite Hubble volume of the universe, so we will always find at least slight anisotropies at the largest scales we can observe. I welcome correction but that's how I conceive of random systems in general -- if there could exist no irregularities without outside intervention, it wouldn't be random, I'd think.
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Post by mikeck on Oct 16, 2016 6:12:28 GMT
Interesting answers. Thank you
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