The most distant protocluster of galaxies

[D007]

Originally Posted by de.das.dude

so if we just had 13.7 billion light years away, we could ave seen the big bang?

Just had been 13 billion light years away? Well then we'd be in an area of space that was technically non existent. you'd be outside the big bang..lol. Unless I am misunderstanding you.. If you could exist "outside" the universe and were 13 billion light years away in nowhere land.. No you wouldn't.. because there would be no light and with no light, you get no pretty scenery.. You wouldn't even know it happened til billions of years later.

The only way you could see it would be about 13 billion years later, which is how long it would take for the light to reach you 13 billion years away from the epicenter.. lol..
To my understanding anyway..

[Ahhzz]

Originally Posted by Drone

What's q?

Am I the only one that got a belly laugh out of having a discussion of science, FTL, the Big Bang, and then someone asks that question with a straight face? who would have guessed that anyone intelligent enough to understand the discussion at all was unaware of the Star Trek "Q" reference No insult intended Drone, promises! Just kinda like being in a Political discussion and have someone ask why it's called "Obamagate"

[Drone]

Originally Posted by Ahhzz

who would have guessed that anyone intelligent enough to understand the discussion at all was unaware of the Star Trek "Q" reference No insult intended Drone, promises! Just kinda like being in a Political discussion and have someone ask why it's called "Obamagate"

None taken. It's ok. I'm no sci-fi fan to be honest. I'm science fan.

[D007]

Originally Posted by Ahhzz

Am I the only one that got a belly laugh out of having a discussion of science, FTL, the Big Bang, and then someone asks that question with a straight face? who would have guessed that anyone intelligent enough to understand the discussion at all was unaware of the Star Trek "Q" reference No insult intended Drone, promises! Just kinda like being in a Political discussion and have someone ask why it's called "Obamagate"

People watch star trek? XD
The movies sure.. The series.. not so much..

[trickson]

Too sweet. I know there are other worlds out there! I just hope they can get here in time to stop mankind from killing it's self off!

[W1zzard]

Originally Posted by D007

Just had been 13 billion light years away? Well then we'd be in an area of space that was technically non existent. you'd be outside the big bang..lol. Unless I am misunderstanding you.. If you could exist "outside" the universe and were 13 billion light years away in nowhere land.. No you wouldn't.. because there would be no light and with no light, you get no pretty scenery.. You wouldn't even know it happened til billions of years later.

The only way you could see it would be about 13 billion years later, which is how long it would take for the light to reach you 13 billion years away from the epicenter.. lol..
To my understanding anyway..

there is no center, imagine a two-dimensional universe being the surface of a balloon. you can not travel away from the surface because you can only move in 2 dimensions. the color of the balloon is initially strong but the more it gets inflated the dimmer the color will be (= temperature in the universe). it doesn't matter where you are on the balloon, you can only observe everything in a circle with radius as far as light would have travelled since you have been put on the balloon. that's your observable universe.

[hat]

Something isn't making any sense to me here. All matter originated in a space as small as a pin point, then the big bang occurred, and threw shit everywhere. We are a small part of that, matter that got thrown out into space and through billions of years evolved into what we are now. If nothing is faster than light, or at least, the fastest thing we know of, then how is it that we are here and light from billions and billions of years ago is just now reaching us? Shouldn't it be long gone by now? Shouldn't we be looking the other direction, chasing after the old light, and steadily losing our grip on it as the light gets too far away for us to see?

[W1zzard]

Originally Posted by hat

how is it that we are here and light from billions and billions of years ago is just now reaching us?

the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.

also, if you believe in the inflation theory, the universe has expanded a lot in its early stages, so there is plenty of space for photons to travel

[T4C Fantasy]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.

also, if you believe in the inflation theory, the universe has expanded a lot in its early stages, so there is plenty of space for photons to travel

what i want to know is exactly how far light has traveled in total *aka the obserable universe* because its definetly more then 13.2 billion light years since we still have a Millennia of innovation to build better scopes, right now the observable universe is a myth because we dont have the technology to see *as of yet* the edge of the universe and i do mean edge by where we can see the universe expanding as we look at it because the more time that goes by the further the universe gets... i think they say the universe is actually 31billion light years long but we can only see 13b light years because that light hasnt reached us yet, the 13billion light years is just what we can see with our technology,.. its not the farthest light has traveled to us yet.

[W1zzard]

Originally Posted by T4C Fantasy

what i want to know is exactly how far light has traveled in total *aka the obserable universe*

it's not that easy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance

Originally Posted by T4C Fantasy

just what we can see with out technology its not the farthest light has traveled to us yet.

no matter what technology you have, there is always a limit to the distance photons can have traveled since the big bang.

[T4C Fantasy]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

it's not that easy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance



no matter what technology you have, there is always a limit to the distance photons can have traveled since the big bang

yes i was reading about that earlier today, but in a millenia we should have the technology to go atleast 85% of that distance

[W1zzard]

the furthest you can possibly go back to, when observing using photons is when the plasma recombination happened = cosmic microwave background

as mentioned before, there are some theories that you could observe neutrinos or even gravitational waves from before that time, but they are barely theoretical

also you would just see more and more isotropy and homogenuity = more boring

[T4C Fantasy]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

the furthest you can possibly go back to, when observing using photons is when the plasma recombination happened.

as mentioned before, there are some theories that you could observe neutrinos or even gravitational waves from before that time, but they are barely theoretical

also you would just see more and more isotropy and homogenuity = more boring

yes but no matter how boring... its still science and science will not stop just because its boring... it would be like saying those little red dots in the image are insignificant because they are just dots on a picture... but its just not.

[largon]

Originally Posted by T4C Fantasy

yes but no matter how boring... its still science and science will not stop just because its boring... it would be like saying those little red dots in the image are insignificant because they are just dots on a picture... but its just not.

You totally misunderstood what you quoted.
When observing universe younger (if it was possible, that is*) than when deionization / atomic recombination happened is of little interest. It was just a totally featureless glowing sphere. BORING.

*light that was emitted inside the plasma was absorbed and no longer exists.

[T4C Fantasy]

Originally Posted by largon

You totally misunderstood what you quoted.
When observing universe younger (if it was possible, that is*) than when deionization / atomic recombination happened is of little interest. It was just a totally featureless glowing sphere. BORING.

*light that was emitted inside the plasma was absorbed and no longer exists.

be realistic, when viewing that far away they ALL look featureless, yet we still try to find them.

[m1dg3t]

I see you guys finally made it to the party! Parking is 'round back

[Inceptor]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

until about 300,000 years after the big bang, the whole universe was filled with plasma.
plasma is opaque to electromagnetic radiation = light can not travel through it

http://img.techpowerup.org/120627/Capture1466.jpg
the cosmic microwave background that we see today is the first light that could move freely through the universe, and has reached us just now. due to the expansion of the universe its wavelength has been shifted down to microwave frequencies.

in theory it could be possible to observe something earlier using neutrinos, for which plasma is transparent. but it's incredibly hard to record neutrinos.

---

the aliens will "see" a sphere of same size as we do, but with the center around their own planet. the big bang happened everywhere at the same time, so there is no place where you could be, to be closer to it, to observe it any better

It's interesting that we live in just the right epoch to easily detect the electromagnetic 'artifacts' of the early universe. Probably nearing the end of such an epoch, as that electromagnetic radiation will slip into the Radio region of the spectrum and then attenuate even more, in a few billion years.
I wonder...
Are we in the 'sweet spot' of the Universe's evolution? The 'sweet spot' for possibly spring-boarding into long-term survivability on the cosmic scale. The perfect time to accumulate adequate knowledge of the Universe's early history, to tangentially inform our technological development?
Big questions, with no answers, but interesting.

[Drone]

Originally Posted by Inceptor

Are we in the 'sweet spot'. Big questions, with no answers, but interesting.

On the contrary. Many astronomers suggest that we're actually late. Expansion pushed all clusters away so everything is quite further now than it was billion years before.

[NinkobEi]

Originally Posted by RejZoR

Theoretically, this could mean that if there are any intelligent creatures, they are probably on these distant galaxies since they were formed looooong before our galaxy did. Plenty of time to evolve.
Hell, it is even possible that there were civilizations that are already gone before even humans started walking the Earth. Who knows.

Um, I always assumed this was common knowledge. Over 13 billion years there have probably been countless civilizations formed and destroyed in the universe. Hell, in our galaxy alone. Hell, maybe even in our solar system! I'm looking forward to the discovery of life in our solar system, it won't be too long, now!

[Drone]

Scientists use Hubble telescope to solve 'missing satellite' problem and shed some light on dark matter and ghost galaxies.

http://phys.org/news/2012-07-hubble-...-galaxies.html

Hubble views of three small galaxies, Hercules, Leo IV and Ursa Major, reveal that they all started forming stars more than 13 billion years ago - and then abruptly stopped - all in the first billion years after the Big Bang. The extreme age of their stars is similar to M92, the oldest known globular cluster in the Milky Way.

These ancient galaxies no longer could form stars so they became dim and almost invisible. How could this happen? Scientists say reionisation caused that.

The relic galaxies are evidence for a transitional phase in the early Universe that shut down star-making factories in tiny galaxies. This phase seems to coincide with the time when the first stars burned off a fog of cold hydrogen, a process called reionisation. In this period, which began in the first billion years after the Big Bang, radiation from the first stars knocked electrons off primeval hydrogen atoms, ionising the Universe's cool hydrogen gas.

Interesting theory

The same radiation that sparked universal reionisation also appears to have squelched star-making activities in dwarf galaxies. The small irregular galaxies were born about 100 million years before reionisation began and had just started to churn out stars at that time. Roughly 2000 light-years wide, these galaxies are the lightweight cousins of the more luminous and higher-mass star-making dwarf galaxies near our Milky Way. Unlike their higher-mass relatives, the puny galaxies were not massive enough to shield themselves from the harsh ultraviolet light. What little gas they had was stripped away as the flood of ultraviolet light rushed through them. Their gas supply depleted, the galaxies could not make new stars.

Poor things, they stood no chance. Interesting read tho. Here's the picture of Leo IV captured by Hubble telescope:



Residing 500 000 light-years from Earth, Leo IV is one of more than a dozen ultra-faint (dim and star-starved) dwarf galaxies lurking around Milky Way. These galaxies are dominated by dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up the bulk of the Universe's mass.

Another interesting link:

http://phys.org/news/2012-07-dark-ga...-universe.html

[Drone]

Using Hubble, Astronomers Spot Oldest Spiral Galaxy Ever Seen

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!

Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. Residing in the constellation Pegasus and named BX442, the surprise spiral has a redshift of 2.18, which means it is 10.7 billion light-years from Earth and therefore existed just 3 billion years after the big bang.

Light from this galaxy has been traveling to Earth for about 10.7 billion years. Would you imagine that? Here it is:



Astronomers thought the spiral was an illusion. But using a special instrument called the OSIRIS spectrograph they determined BX442 was really a rotating spiral.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceno...ral.html?rss=1

[m1dg3t]

Swellin' my Mellon!

[Drone]

Lol your comment made my day It's really fascinating. That galaxy is 10.7 billion light-years from Earth. That's a freaking long distance. My brain boils.

[m1dg3t]

The distance isn't what has my neurons firing it's the fact that we found this early galaxy to observe! It really is an amazing time we are living in right now; our technology is allowing us look/probe farther/deeper into the cosmos allowing us to constantly be learning about our origins. They said the 18th century was the "Age of enlightenment" but i beg to differ, it was merely the begining of the separation of church/state which allowed us to reach the point we are at today; The REAL "Age of Enlightenment"

We aren't here because of some super all knowing, omnipotent being who is self righteous/conceded and wanted to clone himself/herself for amusement....

I can't wait untill they finally start using the plasma rockets on space craft

http://phys.org/news174031552.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variabl...oplasma_Rocket

[D007]

It's just awesome when you try to comprehend it.. Science can allow us to see things over 10 billion LIGHT YEARS away.... eesh..
I can't even see my house from my job...