Will we ever be able to see the beginning of the universe?
As I understand it, when I look at the sun, I don’t see the sun as it is now, rather I see the light of it from 8 minutes ago, and when I look at our closest star after the sun, I am seeing it as it was 4 years ago.
At the moment, we can see about 13 billion years back in time when we look deep in to the universe. Seeing distant galaxies not as they are, but as they used to be.
From what I understand, we can’t see further because the light has not reached us yet. However, in another billion years time, we will be able to see a billion light years further than we can now.
The question is, will there ever come a time, when there is light reaching us from so far away, that it allows us to see what the universe was like at the time of the big bang or just after it?
I don’t mean background radiation or anything like that, I mean seeing as in traditionally seeing the visible light with your eyes.
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I don’t have a clue what the answer is but anyone that can think that deeply deserves a cold beer at the very least.GQ
I know nothing of astrophysics or cosmology, but from what I understand, the first few hundred million years were pretty dark, so we might not be able to “see” this time. But it appears that there the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched in 2018, with one of its goals being to find the first galaxies being formed in the early universe.
Since I won’t be here in a billion years, I wonder very little about it. I do, however, keep hoping that Betelgeuse will blow up while I still have the ocular capacity to appreciate it.
No. We’ll never see any earlier than a couple hundred thousand years after the big bang. That’s the era when cooling allowed charged particles to combine into atoms of neutral matter, whose transparency allows distant objects to be seen through it. Before that, light mostly scattered off hot plasma to produce a uniform glow, rather than remaining organized as images we can capture with telescopes. In some sense that information is lost forever.
It is cool to realize that if there is technologically advanced life on a planet 230 million light years from us, and they had the ability to view our planet today, they’d see dinosaurs…
See @gasman
The radiant energy from the big bang is gone. It is tucked away someplace in the nucleii of hydrogen atoms somewhere.
@Tropical_Willie Okay as long as you beer drinkers don’t suddenly get a thirst for scotch. But that sounds kind of good right now.
Well, the background radiation is the visible light. Or at least it was visible until it was so stretched out by the Doppler effect that it now microwaves.
I think that light is ahead of us now. like a shockwave that has already passed. We’re what’s left in the dust behind it. Wouldn’t you have to be in front of the blast to see it as it was?
In a billion years time we will still see the sun as it was eight minutes ago. On the other hand some of the more distant galaxies we see today will be so far off in a billion years time that we won’t be able to see them at all due to the expansion of the Universe. We will see less and less of the Universe as time passes. One day we will not be able to see any of the galaxies at all as they will be so far off that their light will never reach us.
@ninjacolin
It isn’t 2D linear. It is expansive in all directions. The light, if it were there, would be all around you in every direction you look, moving away in front of everything else you see. If you saw it, you would be seeing the edge of the material universe as established by the big bang. Anything beyond that would not have its origins in the big bang.
@josie Is correct. That’s why you see the cosmic microwave background radiation everywhere you look.
@josie I did mean from outside and looking back in towards the universe as it expands like a bubble. like.. if the universe had ups (like a gps, but more universal) i would’ve been talking about like cooridnates 40.8294,-73.1874
@ninjacolin Look down. That’s where the Big Bang happened. @Dutchess_III You look down too. That’s where the Big Bang happened. It started as a singularity, so it started in all points of the Universe. The misconception is that it started in a point and everything expanded away from it. Since it started as a singularity, it started in ALL points of the universe. That’s why we see the CMBR where ever we look.
You’re gonna have to throw some linkage around for me to accept that, @Rarebear! Sounds pretty cool but it’s not what I’ve heard.
Looking down. My socks don’t match. Is that what caused the Big Bang?
Actually it is the “run” up the back of the right one, the argyle in brown and purple.
If dark energy keeps doing what it does, we won’t see further because most light of the universe will never reach us, making it impossible to see events close to the beginning. We need to hurry and build better telescopes now.
Crazy stuff. It’s like the universe is dimming as a whole.
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