Hubble snaps stunning baby pic of cosmos Galactic whirls from 12 billion years ago

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/06/19/bigbang.view.reut/index.html ^ | Thursday, June 19, 2003 Posted: 2:19 PM EDT (1819 GMT)

[DannyTN]

Thanks for that link. That really big version just seems to go on forever. It reminds me of Yacko's universe...


YAKKO'S UNIVERSE (Episode 3)
Music and lyrics by Randy Rogel.


Everybody lives on a street in a city
Or a village or a town for what it's worth.
And they're all inside a country which is part of a continent
That sits upon a planet known as Earth.
And the Earth is a ball full of oceans and some mountains
Which is out there spinning silently in space.
And living on that Earth are the plants and the animals
And also the entire human race.

It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It's big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It's a big universe and we're not.

And we're part of a vast interplanetary system
Stretching seven hundred billion miles long.
With nine planets and a sun; we think the Earth's the only one
That has life on it, although we could be wrong.
Across the interstellar voids are a billion asteroids
Including meteors and Halley's Comet too.
And there's over fifty moons floating out there like balloons
In a panoramic trillion-mile view.

And still it's all a speck amid a hundred billion stars
In a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
It's sixty thousand trillion miles from one end to the other
And still that's just a fraction of the way.
'Cause there's a hundred billion galaxies that stretch across the sky
Filled with constellations, planets, moons and stars.
And still the universe extends to a place that never ends
Which is maybe just inside a little jar!

It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
Though we don't know how it got here
We're an important part here
It's a big universe and it's ours!

* - In the original script, these lines were:

YW+D : You might think that you're essential
Try inconsequential
It's a small world after all!

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks guys. Very cool.

[DoughtyOne]

Hey, how'd I miss you? Thanks.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Please pardon the misconception. According to the theory of relativity, light does not behave the same as other things. For example if you were traveling at 0.5 c (c = speed of light) in a spaceship and shined a flashlight ahead of the ship, the speed of the beam of light would not be 1.5 c and conversely if you shined it behind the ship, the speed of the beam would not be 0.5 c in the other direction. It would simply be c. Confused yet?

But of course since God created the theory of relativity, he can mess with the rules just to keep people who think they are so smart looking like dufusses (dufi?).

[stainlessbanner]

bttt

[Licensed-To-Carry]

Confused yet?

No, it just means that how ever fast you are traveling, light from you, will travel 186,000 miles a second faster than you are going. I think.

[Beth]

WOW!!

[edsheppa]

A couple of points. First, you're probably assuming that 1B years after the big bang the furthest two points in space-time could be from each other is 2B light-years but the universe could have been bigger than that (e.g. inflation).

Second, a low-end estimate of the hubble constant is 50km/s/Mpc. I think that means we'd be moving about .7c relative to a 13B light-year away galaxy.

[eccentric]

Our God is Awesome!

[DannyTN]

"Confused yet? "

Well, that's the way I understood it. But then it seems like the simple train station math ought to work.

If you have the following:

• E - Earth after 13 billion years.
• B - Location of the Big Bang
• X - Location of galaxy at 1 billion years after bang
• D - Location of distant galaxy now.
• S - The speed of the galaxies.
• C - Speed of light

  E<-----------B->X-------->D

  (BE)(S) = 13 billion (according to scientists)

  So (BE)(S) = (XE)(C) or the destance of the earth from the big bang time the speed the earth has traveled must equal the distance from point X times the speed of light.

  Therefore,

• (BE)S = (XB+BE)(C)
• (BE)S = (XB)C + (BE)C
• (BE)S-(BE)C = (XB)C
• XB = {BE(S-C)}/C
• XB = BE (S-C)/C
• If S=1/4C then XB = BE (1/4 - 1) = -3/4BE

  Or if Speed of galaxies = 1/4 the speed of light then point x should be 3/4ths the distance of the earth from the big bang. Meaning the distant galaxy would have to be 3/4 the age of the universe and that is as far back as we could look.

  The faster the galaxies go the further we can look back until we are going the speed of light and then we should be able to see the big bang itself. But the slower we go, we shouldn't be able to look back very far at all.

  The distance from the Bigbang to the earth times the speed of the earth

  I know this is back of the envelope math, but it just seems counterintutive to what the scientists tell us about being able to look back and see a young cosmos.

[LiteKeeper]

YEC Skeptical SPOTREP

[McCloud-Strife]

I think the bible and science could work together a lot better if they could realize, The Bible says why God did and it, and science sticks to how...
Frankly, I think a lot of the arguement as to who's right is kinda silly The Bible says we came from a pile of sand in God's image, science says much the same when you break it down into simple terms, science adds a lot of steps along the way...

[El Gato]

No, it just means that how ever fast you are traveling, light from you, will travel 186,000 miles a second faster than you are going. I think.

Nope, unlike the fly in the aircraft, both the "moving" observor, on the spaceship, and the "stationary" observor, will measure the light to be moving 186,000 miles/second (3E8 meters/second). That is both Einstiens assumption in developing the equations of special relativity, and obervationally verified. As are at least some of the predictions of SR, such as time running slower for moving objects. (observed by measuring decay times of radioactive atomic nuclei moving at near lightspeed and at rest). Also the prediction that clocks run slower deeper in a gravity well has been verfied by observation/experiment.

As "Doc Brown" might say, you have to think fourth dimensionally to understand how we can possibly look back 12 billion years into the past.

[El Gato]

The distance from the Bigbang to the earth times the speed of the earth

Ah, but there is no "distance to the Big Bang" It was everywhere, in a certain sense. Sort of like the light being everywhere as reported in Genesis. The light (or energy) of the big bang filled the entire universe as it then existed. Took a while for the universe to "cool" enough that matter could even exist. At the energy density of the early universe, only energy could exist. Your calculation are for a Newtonian universe not one where special, not to mention general, relativity exists, such as the one we live in. Even when dealing with solid objects, velocities don't add or subtract vectorially as the speeds approach that of light. If your math were correct, and we were moving away from some object at say 1/2 c, we would measure the speed of the light from that object to be 1/2 c, but we don't, we measure it to be c. (It will be rather redshifted to a lower frequency however)

[El Gato]

Sure it does. First he created the light. Where was the light that he created? Everywhere!

Which is exactly what current notions of the big bang indicate. The light filled the universe. We can even "see" it today. It's the general background radition we can measure in all directions, with an equivalent temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin (3 Celcius degrees above absolute zero) and it indeed is everywhere.

[Arthalion]

What am I missing?

Mostly the fact that WE aren't moving at the speed of light, so we aren't really 12 billion light years from the point where the photons were first emitted. It didn't reach us until now because the universe is expanding, stretching the distances between the galaxies, which really screws with the travel time of those stray little light beams. Toss in the fact that the cosmic expansion isn't constant, but is accelerating, and the math to determine the travel time of our trans-universal photonic travelers gets REALLY fun. Have a peek (and this is the simple version that leaves the acceleration math out).

Despite the fact that this light took 12 billion years to reach us, the originating galaxy was probably only 4 or 5 billion light years away when it was emitted.

[John Valentine]

Danny- You can't assume that our galaxy is as old as the universe. It isn't. Frankly, I don't know how old our galaxy is, but if it were created yesterday, we could still see the light streaming by from that 12 plus billion year old galaxy, certainly long long gone by now. Also, it is the universe itself that is expanding, not a bunch of galaxies expanding into an empty volume of infinite universe.

It is more like blowing up a balloon and watching the printed pattern on the surface of the balloon expand, even though each piece of ink stays attached to its little spot of rubber. You could say that each and every galaxy has stayed in approximately the same place, yet are growiung farther apart because the universe itself is getting bigger.
To bad you can't measure it because the rulers are growing, too.

Then you have to factor in relativistic effects. There is no way to know what went on during the very very early days of the universe, but surely the speed of light was not what it is today, and in fact time itself would have been much different.

It may seem silly to say, because we really lack the language to speak of such things, but the first few seconds of expansion after the big bang may have taken millions of years in the prevailing passage of time then. The passage of time has enormously slowed down now, and things are happenning at a snails pace, but compared to the speed of the passage of time 10 billion years from now, we are zippy indeed. To people that might exist 10 billion years from now, it won't be noticeable at all. To them, we might have come and gone in the first one billion years of the universe, which to them will look to be about 14 or 15 billion years old.

Such is the weirdness of it all...... And it really is this way....

[alnitak]

I count 9 stars (the objects with diffraction spikes). Everything else is a galaxy, apart perhaps for a few red dwarfs and white dwarfs.