Earliest image of the universe yet seen by Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.

Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It’s the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.

These young galaxies haven’t yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in color. That’s mostly because at this stage, they don’t contain many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34711253/ns/multimedia-hd_view_beta

 

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Uh shit another theory(the one that says the farther out you go in the universe you travel back in time) attempted to trying to be stated as fact, sigh, moving on.

 

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One more classic display of ignorance from you.
You don't "travel" back in time, you see back in time: something a light-year away is seen as it was a year ago, something a million light years away is seen as it was a million years ago.

 

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Throw in the fact that the universe has been expanding and I have something that I can't explain.

Assuming the current age of the universe is 13.7billion years old. These objects, being 600million years old would be 13.1 billion light years away from us.

13.1 billion years ago, when the universe was only 600million years old (after the big bang), the universe was a much smaller place than it is today.

So the question is: Why does it take light 13.1billion years to reach us now when these objects were much closer to us the time the light had left these objects?

 

Wow, what absurd ignorance! Considering that you claim to have spent 10 years studying science and 15 hitchhiking, you should stick to what you know the most about (hitchhiking) and leave scientific topics alone.

 

As you say, the universe has been expanding. The distance to the horizon is more like 46 billion light years at the moment, so the things which are 13.7 billion years old are actually 46 billion light years away. The light kind of rides along with the expansion, so it covers a lot more distance than it would with no expansion. We however also ride along with the expansion, so even though we were in some sense much closer to the source 13.7 billion years ago, we were carried away at a rate just fast enough to make the light take 13.7 billion years to get here.

 

Keep in mind that the expansion is also faster than the speed of light - and distant objects are, in effect moving away from us (and everything else) at that speed.

Note that I said "in effect." That's because the objects are NOT moving at that speed - no material object can - but the expansion of space between the objects is at that rate - creating the effect.

 

Hey, mind boggling. The universe expands, but does space expand? Is a metre a the same length throughout the expansion from the big bang to now?

If it is, then as light rides along with the expansion, then light travels faster than the speed of light. Add the comment "the expansion is also faster than the speed of light" - hey, according the Einstein, nothing can exceed the speed of light.

Speaking of Einstein, I wonder if Special Relativity and time/space dilation would have anything to do with all this.

 

Good, now you are starting to think about it.

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Yes, it IS only space that's expanding - and yes, the meter is still the same length as shortly after the BB.

It's not a violation of the speed of light for space to expand faster than that rate because space itself IS nothing. No material is expanding, only space itself.

 

imagine the universe as a balloon, inflating, except this balloon is expanding in at least 4 dimensions, wait, don't try to imagine that.

 

And we are on the surface of the ballon? Or inside it.

 

On the surface, the surface of the "balloon" is 3D space, the "balloon" is expanding in at least 4 Dimensions. It possible to imagine by removing a dimension and imagining the universe is 2D, thin like paper and we are drawn on it, drawn on the surface of the balloon.

 

Even more accurately is to imagine that we - and all other objects - are like raisins dispersed in a loaf of bread that is in the process of rising (expanding). That makes it even more clearer that it's not the raisins (objects) that are expanding but rather the medium (dough/space) that the objects reside in.

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Thus they are spread farther apart - and at an ever-increasing rate, even.

 

Sure that works.

 

I don't have any problems imagining a rising loaf of bread or an expanding balloon. What I have trouble with is that each raisin doesn't know the other exists until it is able to detect it.

I imagine the earth is an expanding balloon. At t=0 a mid oceanic earthquake occurs but from where I am, I won't feel the tsunami until 6 hours later (per the current size of the earth/balloon). The wave propagation is analogous to the speed of light and the earth/balloon is analogous the the expanding universe.

If the earth/balloon is expanding, the tsunami would take longer than six hours to reach me. If the expansion rate is too fast, I'll never feel the tsunami. If the earth/balloon expands at a rate that would take 5.4days for the tsunami to reach me I can ask my original question: why does it take 5.4days for me to feel the tsunami when it was only 6 hours away?

I'm answering my own question.

 

There used to be a graphical representation somewhere on the net that clearly showed "how" looking back in time works...


I.E you can see things that are really distant...really far back in time. But not things that are closer. I mean its really a simple concept once you get it.

 

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/all100.gif

Note the "zone of Avoidance" that is area that you cannot see because it is matter that is relatively close or actually WAS part our near group back then...