Hi everyone,

Well, as we all know, light takes awhile to travel in space. Looking in the sky is like looking in the past. The furthest thing we can see (from what I know) is the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation which was said to be created 400,000 years after the Big Bang. My question is, if one day, we will be able to see the light/gas (through instruments) from the Big Bang. Of course not in our lifetime but it should'nt be that much longer away due to the visibility of the CMBR, relatively speaking.

Or is it never going to come into view because we where a part of it?

Larger space-based telescopes, or very much longer exposures with cameras attached to them, should be able to look farther back in time, so, theoretically at least, it's possible to look back far enough to what is called the era of photon-decoupling. At this point in time after the BB, the universe ceased to be a pervasive and opaque fog of particles and the universe became transparent.

If we could see far enough back to catch the instant just prior to this event, all we'd see is a blank fog of light.

The CMB, incidentally, is all around us. Its wavelength has been shifted far below that of visible light, so we don't "see" it but can pick it up in the radio spectrum. It has been traveling along with us (and throughout the universe) since the BB event at t=0 ... You can pick it up by tuning a VHF TV receiver off-channel and watching the little dots of light on the screen. A small percentage (I think it's about 15%) of these "signal transitions" are photons from the BB event.

Hello,

I have always enjoyed hearing Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak. He has a great book out entitled "Origins" which goes back to the Big Bang and moves forward describing the cosmic evolution.

Bruth

“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.” Einstein

I will tell you a little secret --Astro--- The Big Bang and its theory are false.This is what is being assumed and accepted by those who let themselved be brain washed. According to the BBT at one time something like 13.7 billions years ago the Universe didn't exist. No matter, no atoms, no light, no photons and no space and time. All of a sudden out of nowhere, in an instant the Universe took form as a tiny dense speck filled with light. In a minuscule fraction of a second, all the matter and energy in the cosmos came into existence. At the same time and with the same force it began cooling at on astronomical rate. Today most scientistswant to agree on the following evidence to support the BBT: (1) Cosmic Microwave Background ( cold spot and hot spot in space ), (2) The Universe is Expanding ( meaning Space itself ) and (3) Cosmic abundance of Hilium. If you read carefully you can asked the right questions. First, we are talking of complex systems and formations of matters and elements to just all of a sudden appear out of the blue. For something to exist it must first have the Space to occupied no matter how small or even if its invinsible. The evidence that are being suggested are weak cause Space has cold and hot spots. The Universe is not Space. The Universe is made up of groups of Galaxies and other objects the occupy Space. This means that there are other Universes with different history as to how they came to be. Among them are those that are much older than ours, like hundreths of billions years and even thousand of billions of year. Space is one UNIT, it does not create itself nor can it be created, nor was created -- it just is. So, the question will be --- how did it polluted itself ??????????????? It does not EXPAND. The fact that Galaxies are moving away from each other is no evidence of EXPANSION. Everything is in constant motion except for SPACE.

I believe Dark Energy (the force causing the Universe to push away from itself) and Dark Matter (matter that does not reflect light) occupy about 96% of the Universe. These two subjects are still a mystery to many of the most intelligient. Interstellar gas (hydrogen should be included since it is the most common element in the Universe (space) and is the substance that would be used to fuel the Bussard Ramjet) occupies about 3.6% of the Universe. Stars (and planets) occupy about .4% of the Universe.

Food for thought.

Bruth

"Imagination is more important than knowledge". Einstein 

Just to provide the appropriate counterpoint arguments:

fluflu:

I will tell you a little secret --Astro--- The Big Bang and its theory are false.

The BBT is falsifiable and is, thus, a bona fide Theory. It has been tested. It has weaknesses. It has NOT been falsified.

This is what is being assumed and accepted by those who let themselved be brain washed.

It is accepted as the current standard model for cosmology. There is no doubt it will continue to change (that is what theories do, as new technologies and data are developed).

 According to the BBT at one time something like 13.7 billions years ago the Universe didn't exist. No matter, no atoms, no light, no photons and no space and time. All of a sudden out of nowhere, in an instant the Universe took form as a tiny dense speck filled with light. In a minuscule fraction of a second, all the matter and energy in the cosmos came into existence.

So far, so good, generally.

At the same time and with the same force it began cooling at on astronomical rate.

It began cooling as it expanded (gas does that).

Today most scientistswant to agree on the following evidence to support the BBT: (1) Cosmic Microwave Background ( cold spot and hot spot in space )

Well, I guess you could describe it that way. It is red-shifted photons from the initial event (not just hot and cold "spots").

... (2) The Universe is Expanding ( meaning Space itself ) and (3) Cosmic abundance of Hilium.

You left out hydrogen, deuterium, and lithium ... but who's counting?

 If you read carefully you can asked the right questions. First, we are talking of complex systems and formations of matters and elements to just all of a sudden appear out of the blue.

It's much simpler than that: it was spacetime and elemental sub-particles at first. Everything else grew from those humble beginnings. There were no molecules, for example, produced by the BB (much less anything more complex).

The Universe is made up of groups of Galaxies and other objects the occupy Space.

So far, so good ...

Jeff,

I need to ask a question of someone who knows more about the BB than me. I am just an everyday person who loves to look at the sky and learn as much as I can. It's cloudy tonight so I can't go out and observe. 

I have read alot about the BB and from what I undertand when the BB happened there were millions, or more, of years where there was basically nothing just the expansion of what was then the Universe, gaseous material. Then things started happening and forming. Now maybe I don't understand this or not but the BB happened more on flat plane than an expansion in all directions. Is that correct?

Now for my question. If at some point, be it tomorrow or 100 years from now, if we can see back far enough, any mode or telescope type, we will see where that was basically nothing or was there formations of galaxies even in the first part of the BB expansion?

I hope I explained that correctly.

jodoak:

I have read alot about the BB and from what I undertand when the BB happened there were millions, or more, of years where there was basically nothing just the expansion of what was then the Universe, gaseous material.

First would have come a fog of subatomic particles, and then somewhat later atoms. There was a period when the entire Universe was opaque, when photons couldn't yet travel any appreciable distance without being absorbed and re-emitted almost instantaneously. After what is called the era of photon decoupling, the Universe became transparent. I like to think of this as the beginning of the era of coalescence, because until this point the Universe hadn't cooled enough for matter larger than atoms to form and persist.

Then things started happening and forming.

Yep.

Now maybe I don't understand this or not but the BB happened more on flat plane than an expansion in all directions. Is that correct?

Perhaps according to Brane "theory" (which I don't understand). But not according to BBT. The standard model holds that all dimensions we can sense today formed at the instant of the BBT. It must have formed that way in order to allow particles -- even subatomic ones -- to exist, because they exist in multiple dimensions (at least three).

Now for my question. If at some point, be it tomorrow or 100 years from now, if we can see back far enough, any mode or telescope type, we will see where that was basically nothing or was there formations of galaxies even in the first part of the BB expansion?

If the BBT is correct, then we wouldn't be able to see beyond (further back than) the era of photon decoupling, because the Universe was opaque from t=0 until that point.

If we assume that our technology will continue to improve to the point where we can see back that far, we won't be able to go any further because the photon fog will provide a barrier to light (that is, light will be bound up in that fog, unable to penetrate it or escape from it). I'm not sure what it would look like. I mean, if you ran a clock backward while staring in its direction from close range, would what you see be a universe sparsely populated with new-born galaxies, immediately preceded by young stars, immediately preceded by bright gas and dust clouds, immediately preceded by ... what? "white noise"? ... an impenetrable "wall of light?" ... and that's preceded by what, "blankness"? And what's the color / visible texture of blankness? It shouldn't be dark, because it's too hot, but it wouldn't be emitting light (because the photons are trapped) ...

You'd be moving right to left along the central axis of this diagram:

... and when you get to about half a billion years from t=0 you'd see something like the WMAP mapping of the CMB (patches of light and dark) ... but prior to that, what? In the diagram above, it's just represented by brightness (no detail) and as you go further back toward t=0 it gets brighter.

It's labeled "quantum fluctuations" and we often speak of "quantum foam" ... but what does that look like?

What we often forget in these conjectures is that the size of the Universe is likewise diminishing rapidly as we approach t=0, so that any significant fraction of the distance (in time) from the era of inflation back toward the origin the Universe is very much smaller than a human being and, in fact, so tiny that even if we could look in that direction it would quite likely be too small for us to see other than as an impossibly bright point.

I suspect it would be quite like looking down a tunnel, where the further you peer into the tunnel the smaller it seems to get.

This is the image above.

See the three little multicolored dots in the upper right of this image? That’s NASA’s WMAP satellite, seen from a distance of 1.5 million km from earth.

Bruth

Imagine 

With all due respect to all: to believe and accept something cause there is nothing else available to compete with the BBT and show that Space is not created and does not create itself. Here is a question, since spacetime and the Universe is Expanding -- Whats in Front of that Expansion? Second question: Could there had been simulteneous events at the initials of the Big Bang? That is to say not just one Big Bang. If we were to travel to the farthest Galaxy and from there look with the most powerful telescope we will see that there are other Galaxies and clusters of Galaxies much further away. Will the BBT then change its age to What? There are other questions but I must go now cause I got to work. Not all that we see in the cosmo as traveling " LIGHT " is the past. Most of what we see is there as it is now, so there is very little that we see as the past. The Universe is not expanding and it does not include " SPACE ". It seems that someone decided that, " hey, I'm going to proposed just how everything came about --- a Singularity will be the accepted idea and theory which will gathered the most evidence and endure throughout time. The problem with this is that science has no ways or means to raced to that beginning and stand one step away from where Space is expanding. It does not make sense and is not scientific, something must pushed on something if space were to be expanding. Again, what's in front that Space is Pushing against in order to continued. You just can't say, hey Space is creating itself to make way for the rest of creation, is like saying that Space has a mind of its own. 

OK, reasonable questions.

fluflu:

With all due respect to all: to believe and accept something cause there is nothing alse available to compete with the BBT

That's right. It wasn't always this way. When the BBT was first proposed, the leading theory was the Steady State Theory. The BBT replaced it because it was a better fit to observational data. Even today there are alternatives: String Theory, M Theory, Cyclic Universes, etc. These are not falsifiable and, hence, are not properly labeled Theory, so they may more properly be thought of as extensions to BBT. While they do propose events prior to (and in one case subsequent to) the BB event itself, they do not falsify the BB ... this creates the problem of having coexisting Theory and extensions, where the BB event would wipe out any trace of data needed to support the others, which prevents us from verifying them.

... and show that Space is not created and does not create itself.

Once again I'll mention that there is no evidence that spacetime is infinite. That doesn't prove it's not infinite. But, if it is not infinite, then it had a beginning, or will have an end, or both. And if either of those is true, then somehow it was created. There is no logical problem with having a creation event for spacetime (it is simply a primary tenet, not a corollary).

Here is a question, since spacetime and the Universe is Expanding -- Whats in Front of that Expansion?

This is another problem with incomplete logic. If the BBT is true, even if none of the proposed extensions or replacements are true as well, there is no need for spacetime to have something out in front of it. That is, it need not expand into anything. It is logically consistent that spacetime can be expanding on its own, with no need for anything outside of it.

Second question: Could there had been simulteneous events at the initials of the Big Bang?  That is to say not just one Big Bang. 

Yes. But any BB event would have wiped out all traces of any other event. Perhaps overwhelmed is a better phrase to apply. Another way to put it is that any other event either must have been sequestered elsewhere/when or have been less powerful (so have not to have left its mark on the BB event's signature). There is currently no way for us to determine whether there were other events at t=0 (of course, that's what we said before we discovered Inflation).

If we were to travel to the farthest Galaxy and from there look with the most powerful telescope we will see that there are other Galaxies and clusters of Galaxies much further away. Will the BBT then change its age to What?

Likely not. We don't date the BB event by calculating look-back time. We date the BB event by running computer simulations of conditions we observe and physical "laws" we extrapolate and test predictively based on observational data. We run these simulations backward in time, tweak the initial conditions, and run them forward again -- over and over -- until we've refined them to result in conditions like those we observe today. We then rewind them as far as possible to determine the
"date" of t=0 that provides the best match.

To use your analogy, one would "date" the Universe by looking as far out in space (back in time) in every direction possible given current technology. That would give you an estimate of the date of the era of photon decoupling: not the precise date, because you'd still be seeing stars and galaxies. To get the actual age of the Universe, you'd have still farther to go because the Universe expanded and cooled for that period prior to becoming cool enough for stars and galaxies to form. Since we can't see that period, we must calculate it -- and that requires assumptions (those which go into the computer models mentioned previously).

Good questions FluFlu.

Jeff,

A very good expanation. I believe I understand the BBT a bit better now. This tells me we may not see back in time far enough to the origins, at least visually.

I would think that there should still be a fairly spectacular amount of energy lingering at the point of inception. Maybe some day we will be able to detect that.

Thanks again. 

chipdatajeffB:

Likely not. We don't date the BB event by calculating look-back time. We date the BB event by running computer simulations of conditions we observe and physical "laws" we extrapolate and test predictively based on observational data. We run these simulations backward in time, tweak the initial conditions, and run them forward again -- over and over -- until we've refined them to result in conditions like those we observe today. We then rewind them as far as possible to determine the
"date" of t=0 that provides the best match.

I bet you didn't run that on a laptop. I would think that would have taken some computing power to generate some results.

Yes Jeff, quite the explanation already explained though.

Maybe CERN will give us some answers.

Bruth 

So here we go: The known Universe is made up of about 70% dark energy: 25% cold matter: 4% invisble atoms: 0.5% Hydrogen and Helium: 0.01% visible atoms: while neutrinos is about 0.01% and another 2% will fall under " uncertainties " since the masses of the three kinds of neutrinos are unknown. There are two main unknown variables that occupied the greater majority of Space: Dark Energy and Cold Matter, thats 95% of Space between the two. This is like stating one visible Universe of only 5% and one invisible Universe of 95%. Now this brings to mind a questions: What governs that 95%? Of course the answer to such a question is unknown given the fact that neither dark energy and cold matter had not been observed dierectly. This present a problem in my mind as to the developments of not only one problem but two in the formation of the Universe. First, I will think that these were in existence prior to the BB, if there was a BB. I have my own thoughts as to that 95% being like a gigantive invisible blancket spreading in all directions to keep all others systems in order and not in choas. This is not to implied an intelligent mind operating the working of existence but rather that in nature there are explanations and an order in every systems and Space is no execption as to its Nature. According to Einstein, we only used less than 5% of our brain and ironocally we only observed less than 5% of our Universe. The greater part of Space is unknown, the greater part of the age of Space is unknown. The answer is not the existence of the ( CBR ) Cosmic Background Radiation nor some undefine gravity field. These are systems within systems all interconnected and relating to each other they are not crashing into one another. Happy day to all.