Hubble team breaks cosmic distance record
By pushing NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.
“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” explained principal investigator Pascal Oesch of Yale University. The team includes scientists from Yale University, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and the University of California.
Astronomers are closing in on the first galaxies that formed in the universe. The new Hubble observations take astronomers into a realm that was once thought to be only reachable with NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
This measurement provides strong evidence that some unusual and unexpectedly bright galaxies found earlier in Hubble images are really at extraordinary distances. Previously, the team had estimated GN-z11’s distance by determining its color through imaging with Hubble and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Now, for the first time for a galaxy at such an extreme distance, the team used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to precisely measure the distance to GN-z11 spectroscopically by splitting the light into its component colors.
Astronomers measure large distances by determining the “redshift” of a galaxy. This phenomenon is a result of the expansion of the universe; every distant object in the universe appears to be receding from us because its light is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels through expanding space to reach our telescopes. The greater the redshift, the farther the galaxy.
“Our spectroscopic observations reveal the galaxy to be even farther away than we had originally thought, right at the distance limit of what Hubble can observe,” said Gabriel Brammer of STScI, second author of the study.
Before astronomers determined the distance for GN-z11, the most distant galaxy measured spectroscopically had a redshift of 8.68 (13.2 billion years in the past). Now, the team has confirmed GN-z11 to be at a redshift of 11.1, nearly 200 million years closer to the Big Bang. “This is an extraordinary accomplishment for Hubble. It managed to beat all the previous distance records held for years by much larger ground-based telescopes,” said investigator Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University. “This new record will likely stand until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.”
The combination of Hubble’s and Spitzer’s imaging reveals that GN-z11 is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way and has just one percent of our galaxy’s mass in stars. However, the newborn GN-z11 is growing fast, forming stars at a rate about 20 times greater than our galaxy does today. This makes an extremely remote galaxy bright enough for astronomers to find and perform detailed observations with both Hubble and Spitzer.
The results reveal surprising new clues about the nature of the very early universe. “It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” explained investigator Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
These findings provide a tantalizing preview of the observations that the James Webb Space Telescope will perform after it is launched into space in 2018. “Hubble and Spitzer are already reaching into Webb territory,” Oesch said.
“This new discovery shows that the Webb telescope will surely find many such young galaxies reaching back to when the first galaxies were forming,” added Illingworth.
This discovery also has important consequences for NASA’s planned Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which will have the ability to find thousands of such bright, very distant galaxies.
The team’s findings have been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of theAstrophysical Journal.
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The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.
For more information about previous times Hubble broke the distance record, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/distance-record.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/sn-wilson.html
A friend quipped that this is nearly old enough to image the “big cigarette that followed the big bang.”
One question regarding galaxy formation is “what came first? The galaxy or the black hole in the center?” At the moment, most think that the black hole came first. This object doesn’t seem to shed light on that question, but others might.
Black holes are formed by gravitational collapse of matter, so the matter must have come first. There is a good chance that dark matter help form galaxies amplifying the effect of gravity in the accretion process.
” Black holes are formed by gravitational collapse of matter, so the matter must have come first.”
Does it squeeze the space out of atoms, or does it crush space’s x,y,&z dimension?
An expansion of our x,y&z could be the source of inflation, a singularity crushes space, just as string theory says all the extra dimensions are collapsed now.
Leif,
I seem to have a very dim memory of some theoretical derivation by Sir James Jeans of a limiting value for the total mass, or maybe it is a density thing, for a uniform cloud of matter; presumably hydrogen, wherein he proved that above some limit, the whole thing must become unstable and break up and collapse into disjointed disparate parts, ie. galaxies and stars.
Pretty much what some primordial cloud of gas may have done.
Am I misremembering, or is there such a Jeans theorem ??
G
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeans_instability
Thanks Leif. Avery readable expose, and makes me happy that I am not going mad quite yet. It is now in my favorites file.
G
You do have to wonder at the wonder of it and wonder how we could have politicians in today’s world (some even possibly make it to the most powerful position on the planet) who would say this is all bunkum because the world is only 6000 years old(or is it 3000?). Although there is one (who could well win the nomination) who would have you believe he created the universe.
@Simon:
Oddly, that calculation was first made mainstream by St. Augustine of Roman Catholic Church fame (his loathing of the idea of centering the church in Rome notwithstanding, but I digress). To continue the “math,” one would have to guess the current “age” to be between 5ka – 6ka, but that’s only if 1) one accepts the good clergyman’s word on the subject, AND 2) one ignores the Bible’s own text which strongly discourages using genealogies for that (or any other) kind of calculation. . . the very things which Augustine used to figure his figures.
In other words, another classic case of an assumed valid starting point leading to a bad conclusion.
Smokey – where does the Bible say to not use genealogies for calculations of the time since the creation?
@TheLastDemocrat:
An apt question, and one that deserves an in-depth response. My intent in so doing is not to start a religious discussion (I seek not to change anyone’s world view, I promise), but rather to look at the evidence logically & rationally to show why St. Augustine, et al., are mistaken in their very starting point, let alone their conclusion.
As I’m sure you knew when you commented, there is no, e.g., 13th Commandment which states “Thou shalt not use genealogies to figure the age of My Creation!” ^_^ However there are passages in the New Testament which much more generally insist that for purposes beyond demonstrating the lineage of the messiah himself, genealogies are not something one need worry about in detail. For example; Titus 3:9 states “But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.” (ESV)
In addition, a student of biblical text will quickly note that there are some clear differences between (e.g.) the genealogy of Christ as reported by Matthew and the same genealogy as reported by Luke. Regardless of the explanations for those differences (and there are a number — NOT an attack on Christians here), that in itself should indicate that the idea of dating the universe using biblical genealogy is an exercise in gross approximation at best, and a fool’s errand at worst.
Further, accepting the story of the Garden of Eden on its face (should we? NO COMMENT!), there is no reference given for how long Adam & Eve stayed there before the Fall took place. (For those pointing vehemently at Gen 5:5, it is understood by most scholars I’m aware of that the counting of years of age did not start until after the Fall & expulsion from Eden — the point at which Adam was cut off from the Tree of Life, the point at which the very term “age” became meaningful, since he was effectively immortal prior to that point.) Thus, even if one COULD rely on genealogy to get back to Adam (we’ve already shown we cannot), one still has no clear idea of how long Adam had been around at the time of the Fall, and thus no idea how old the Earth might actually be.
And finally, the Genesis creation story itself is pretty clear that it deals with beginning of the Earth alone (or at the very most its attendant solar system) and not the beginning of the universe as a whole. Genesis 1:2 suggests that the Earth, though “formless & void” at that point, nevertheless existed. Needless to say, there is no mention of how long it existed in that condition, and thus no way at all to guess the age of the cosmos in which it travels.
Bottom line: Unless one starts making things up out of whole cloth (a popular pastime with many of the religiously minded, I am aware), there really is no way to use Bible (hi)stories to date creation. Thus even a believer in the literal text of those scriptures cannot be confident of an Earth aged less than ten thousand years, let alone a similarly-young cosmos. However, it ALSO means that a believer in Judeo-Christian scriptures CAN accept that the Earth may be much older than, e.g., 6,000 years; Science & Scripture are not, in this area, mutually exclusive (whether or not you may believe they are in others).
Emotionally charged as this topic tends to become, I will let this contribution to the discussion be my last.
So if you can take a picture of something 13.4 billion light years away, where is it now? Did it recede even further away? And being that there is a variety of objects that are closer at all different time intervals, the light would smear if we went every tenth of a billion years. Closer though the idea of landmarks, distance and expanding space, some stars that are in close proximity to this solar system should show a blue shift. Hunters use a technique of running at an angle to get closer to their prey without spooking them. Whether space is expanding or not, the actual distance decreases at times. That would indicate that space is not expanding faster than the speed of light. There would be no order of magnitudes. Additionally, everything would have to expand at exactly the very same instance that everything else does, at exactly the same proportions. The size of some atoms would be larger than others? Gravity wouldn’t exist. There would be no consistency in wavelengths of any part of the electromagnetic spectrumn. If space were expanding, x rays would degrade into a lower frequency from being strecthed. Everything would become one long wave
If we were traveling towards an object that was stationary at the speed of light and fixed our gaze upon it, during the light year we would see it change fast foward. If it was receding away, events would unfold in slow motion, and moving towards us, it would appear to outrun the speed of light ( maybe it does). . On second thought, I don’t know what we’d be seeing relative to time. I was thinking of predictably and un predictably.
So if you can take a picture of something 13.4 billion light years away, where is it now?
Since space has expanded during the 13.4 billion years, the galaxy is ‘now’ much further away, some 30 billion light years. But the concept of ‘now’ is not well-defined.
I’m following the thought process here that space is expanding so the galaxies are relatively non moving. Ok, then what is the explanation for stars orbiting inside the galaxy. What is moving? If the galaxies are stationary, and we can calculate the distances away, then we can also calculate the difference individual stars are moving. The difference in the red shift would tell us how fast the universe is expanding. That still doesn’t explain why we don’t see a blue shift. That would also indicate that there is a make and break point in a galaxy. Stars that are still orbiting but moving away from each other are in the break area, and stars that are orbiting around the center which are being drawn in are not expanding away. For this idea of a red shift to be correct there has to be a blue shift somewhere. Or the universe could be a lot stranger than we can imagine. If space is expanding, everything would be the same. We wouldn’t be able to tell. If matter didn’t expand along with it in space, it would become infinitely small. For example, a meter stick, is still a meter, no matter what the space could be. It’s like the ruler for measuring fish. I caught a meter long fish, but in the real world it is only 20cm. The universe at this order of magnitudes has to be ordered and not choatic. Time would not have an arrow. There would be discontinuity in time. Events would start and jump to some other event randomly.
Gravity is keeping the stars where they are, just like it does for planets in the solar system.
The expansion of space is no weak compared to the forces that work on the scale of a galaxy, a star, a planet, a human being, that it is completely negligible. I cannot blame my expanding girth on the expansion of the universe.
The planets are moving relative to one another. The sun is moving in an orbit around the galaxy, and all the planets are following the sun. It is not logical that there are no blue shifts. Stars are moving and orbiting the galaxy like the planets. Stars closer to the center have to be approach, line up, and pass our solar system. And stars that orbit each other in elliptical orbits have to show a blue and red shifts. We should be able to see that.
This solar sytem orbits every 250 million years. With thousands of stairs at least one must be approaching with an orbit of 200 million years.
Also, we can take pictures of galaxies in frames, from one year to the next, and one decade to the next. If the space is expanding, then we would see that in the pictures. The same picture would not fit in the same frame.
Lots of stars show blue-shift. E.g. Sirius: “Sirius is gradually moving closer to the Solar System, so it will slightly increase in brightness over the next 60,000 years”
Ok so there is blue shift that we can measure. So, if that’s true and at the same time space is expanding, then is that movement, or all movement, creating a wave . Rather than being a nice ordered structure with 3 d lines that determine the location of objects, it’s a weird jumble of lines that are stretched and pulled. It would indicate that space is not expanding equally everywhere. For example, a trip to Mars, knowing where the space lines are pinched traveling there might not be the smooth trajectory of a curve, but sudden angle turns. A trip to anywhere could be real short. This is really great ideas. I had always thought that if in a ship you get to going really fast, you’d have to know where everything is in your path. You have a bad day if you ran into a rock. Then thereal is the exact angle and the pixel at some place far out. If you are off even a little at very high speeds you could end up in something. Then there is the ever present problem, how do you stop this thing. Traveling along pinched lines solves all those problems.. in this new universe, I don’t know what distance is if it’s being pulled like taffy. And if time is related to distanced traveled, time gets strange as well.
If the space is expanding, then we would see that in the pictures.
No, because gravity that keeps the stars in their orbit is MUCH stronger than the expansion.
@rishrac:
You aren’t crazy in thinking that there should be plenty of objects moving toward us rather than away: there certainly are. Even at inter-galactic distances, there are objects that are overall blue-shifted. These objects are, however, quite rare, and mainly confined to the Local Group and Virgo Cluster, as lsvalgaard indicated.
In fact, the best that most objects outside of our own Local Group can do is to be “less red shifted” than their own parent galaxies/clusters due to their peculiar motion in our direction; that object as a whole is still being dragged away by the expansion of space more than fast enough to counter its peculiar motion and render the light red shifted overall. For the vast majority of extra-galactic objects that effect shifts light significantly to the red, with increasing distance highly correlated with an increasing red shift.
I do realize that all the data is red shifted. And that some is less than red shifted than others. I can’t work this out without distortion in the actual distances between objects and the frequency shift. If space is expanding then so is the meter stick in relation distance. Space would be expanding at certain magnitudes of order but not in others. Which is curious. Perhaps there is a way of using this in space travel. If everything in the universe is moving away from each other, colliding stars, black holes, merging galaxies, asteroids that hit the earth, couldn’t or shouldn’t happen. If you were on a sun that was merging with another, the physical reality is that they are getting closer, but still a red shift? I’ve thought of a few experiments. The phase shift of light from here to the moon. We have mirrors there. We can calculate the actual distance during its closet approach with when it moves to its furthest. I suppose that I’m thinking that the phase shift in light is not linear with distance, but a proportionality or an inverse function. If there are distortions between light and space, then it would be possible to ride a distortion faster than the speed of light. Because matter didn’t change. How much faster? It opens up a whole new box. Then does time exist there. So how fast is fast, if there is no element of time? We wouldn’t need to build a ship that would be huge for space travel. We could jump from place to place in a smaller version.
You wouldn’t know your girth was expanding because the rest of you would be expanding as well. Unless we are in some circus with funny mirrors. Since I can’t get the universe in an ordered mirror, it has to be a circus. I always remember how Morgan Lefay trapped Merlin, in his own reflection.
The expansion of space is so weak compared…
@rishrac
Imagine floating in space, the universe is still ionized plasma, but right before it clears.
Iirc the universe is about 380,000 light years old. There is no outside.
Now you’re floating someplace in a hot bright let’s call it a fog.the fog has spectral lines. Lets say over the entire universe clears of fog at once. What you’d see is a wall of light receding in all directions, in a year, that wall would be 1 light year away in all directions. You are in the middle of a clear bubble that’s 2 light years in diameter. In 13.6 B light years, it’s a 27 some B lt years across. But, our spectral lines have a sigma of 1, no shifting al all.
So let’s go back, and say once the universe clears, it also expands, and by now the light from the receding light fog is stretched 1,100 some odd times.This wall is the cmb, we can see no light futher.
But to me it’s clear there is a much larger universe beyond the observable universe, this is a continuation of this universe.
But this not accounting for what’s beyond our universe , there could be any number of other bubbles of something like space time, or not, we just don’t know.
But string theory says there could be an astronomical number of these other dimension universes.
micro6500
“…But string theory says there could be an astronomical number of these other dimension universes….”
Yea, and there could be an Easter Bunny.
Lots of people can’t wait for string theorists to start predicting falsifiable stuff with their crazy voodoo.
In my inner most thoughts, I don’t think space is expanding at all. I think it is something we, as a species, have a hard time with…. infinity. There is not an astronomical number of other dimensions, but an infinite number. And quite possible, each is infinite in size. We like to put things in a jar and that is all the space there is. Well, what’s on the outside of the jar?
That was with the Hubble. Imagine what we might see when the James Webb space telescope is launched in October 2018. Very exciting.
After Hubble they will see 15billion, then 20 billion, then 25 billion…
The universe is infinite in time and space, no start, no end.
Then what.
@bobd06:
As it stands, the CMB stands about 300ka after the (presumed) inflation of the universe, and represents the “surface of light” beyond which we cannot probe using EM radiation, no matter how good our telescopes get. The CMB is nothing more or less than the after-glow of the era when spacetime & everything in it had cooled to the point of becoming transparent to EM radiation. Thus, if we ever end up seeing something that’s more than ~13.6 billion light-years away, that will equate to seeing some thing that is greater than ~13.6ga old.
In other words, we’ll know our current cosmology requires a SIGNIFICANT re-write! (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ^_^)
LOL – well said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_%28cosmology%29
explains the theory of cosmic inflation in the very earliest moments of the universe. It’s the spacetime that inflates not objects moving apart in the conventional sense.
… and while the expansion speed was greater than c all possible light was pulled away from ‘us’. Exactly at c our ‘view’ started to grow at c. And that was about 13.+ billion years ago and happened all over the place. So after say, 1by we would be able to ‘see’ objects 1b light years away when they would have been able to emit photons back then (what they didn’t). Right now our ‘view’ still expands at exactly c in all directions like it ever has since it started.
I think the expansion of space slowed down in a damped vibration and we are now on the first rising branch (unless someone has measured more swings).
Curvature of space increasing does not mean space is expanding; a thought experiment.
John
John
Where/how do you see “curvature of space increasing”?
Chip Javert,
Thought experiment. There is a principle of equivalence between a ‘gravitating’ mass curving space and an ‘acceleration’ (change of speed or change of direction) curving space, so I am wondering if there is equivalency between an expanding universe hypothesis and an hypothesis of change in space curvature.
John
I must be pretty dense. Light travels at a fixed speed, right? So, how does having a special receptor, lens, IC, or whatever, increase the speed of light received by the receptor?
If I put a camera, a telescope, and an electronic device at the same distance from a given point, how can one receive the light faster than the one next to it? Won’t they all be receiving the same light at the same time?
I just don’t understand why one can see farther back in time than the other. They are all receiving the exact same input with different resolutions, aren’t they?
@jr72023:
Not dense, just confusing your terms. ^_^
An object one light-year away emits light which travels at the same speed as that from an object two light-years away. however, as the units imply, the light from the first object only takes a year to arrive while the light from the second object takes two years to arrive. This means that the light we see from the first object gives us information about how that object looked a year ago (rather than just now, or a few minutes ago, etc.), while the light from the second object tells us how THAT one looked two years ago.
Now extend this to objects (like this newly-discovered galaxy) which are 13.4 billion light years away. Since it takes all that time for the light to get here, the image shows how that object appeared some 13.4 billion years ago, rather than showing how it looks today. Thus, the farther away these objects are, the further back in time we’re looking in terms of the universe as a whole.
They all capture em waves of the correct wavelength of the detector.
But since light has a finite velocity, it takes time to travel long distances.
To travel 2.2 (iirc) million light years, the light has to leave 2.2 million years ago.
This is M31 the Andromeda galaxy I took with a dslr and a small telescope in my driveway.when this light left M31, it was 2.2 million years ago here.
And yes, it’s moved since then.
Fine picture, Mike. What’s that small galaxy below M31?
” Fine picture, Mike. What’s that small galaxy below M31?”
I’m not sure, one of the small elipical galaxies bound to the local group I think.
This is V404(very center), a yellow giant (?), with a black hole companion.
MC,
All those stars are in the foreground, I presume?
You can tell I’m not an astronomer. Just trying to make sense of the pics.
” All those stars are in the foreground, I presume?”
In M31, unless they’re fuzzy, yes they are stars, fuzzy=galaxies(in that image).
V404 should be all stars, and a black hole you can’t see.
And thanks!
I think people need to understand the distinction between Doppler red and blue shifts having to do with local movement within space and cosmological red shifts which have to do with the expansion of space itself.
I’m eating popcorn and getting a headache. And….my low beer light is flickering.
This has been an absolutely enjoyable thread – thank you WUWT!
I hope the fellow who announced this was wearing a shirt that wouldn’t be objectionable to feminists.
Thanks WUWT and all for a great cerebral calisthenic workout! I’m still suspicious of the constancy of time… after all, the shortest distance between two points is when they are in the same place, i.e. t=0. And what would that do to the colour of light? or the frequency of a photon?
The best thing about the big bang is its complete irrelevance to anything.
Black holes are formed by the collapse of mathematics…
I was taught in school that, if you test an hypothesis and get ridiculous results, then there is something wrong with your hypothesis.
The current consensus is that:
1. The greater the red shift, the faster a celestial object is moving away from us, and the farther away from us it is
2. A Big Bang occurred about 13.8 Billion years ago
3. Nothing in the universe can go faster than the speed of light.
This new galaxy was found at 13.4 Billion years in the past. But, since the universe only started 400 Billion years before that, then this new galaxy got to its present location from wherever the Big Bang occurred in 400 Billion years. To achieve this great feat, it had to travel 13.4 / 0.4 = 33.5 times the speed of light.
Of course current theory says that the speed it is moving away gets bigger the farther away it is, so it could be traveling away today (13.4 Billion years ago) at perhaps 50 times the speed of light.
It would seem to me that at least part of the consensus is wrong. Even if an object could travel as fast as the speed of light, then the farthest we possibly could see is halfway to the beginning of time – it would take the other half for the light to have reached us.
What is wrong is that you assume the galaxies are moving:
3. Nothing in the universe can go faster than the speed of light.
They are not. Space is expanding, and that is both predicted and allowed by General Relativity. There is no speed limit on the expansion.
Leif – Not that I’m an expert (by any means), but that’s a new one for me. So you’re saying that space, and the objects occupying that space, are totally unrelated concepts? Objects which were at the edge of space today, and again at the edge of space tomorrow, may not have moved at all, even though they may be 50 days at light speed farther away from us? This goes back to my “ridiculous results” comment. If you want to use what may be a useful construct to study the universe, you’re welcome to do so – I’ll continue to think of it as wheels within wheels.
Micro – Are you suggesting that the Big Bang, rather than occurring from an infinitesimally small singularity, took place from a “point” that was 13.8 (or 27.6?) light years apart? If not, then how did they get (instantaneously) to where they are?
that space, and the objects occupying that space, are totally unrelated concepts?
Your question is incomplete. Massive objects curve or warp the space around them so there is a relation, but ‘space’ is akin to the surface of the Earth and objects are akin to, e.g., cities on that surface. Space expands and the distances between galaxies thus increases, but the galaxies do not move through space, they basically sit still and are just along for the ‘ride’.
We are inside the singularity that became our spacetime, All of the universe, even the parts outside our light cone is inside that point.
The Galaxy formed where it is, it did not move at all.
The CMB is the receding light that came from the entire Universe when the early ionized plasma switched from glowing to not glowing, the light switch turned off. We see the edge of that light in the far far distance.
The one law of the universe we do know is that energy can not be created or destroyed, it is interchangeable in many forms. One form is presure, presure differences in gravity on a glactic scale caused by space itself produce gravitational eddies, these eddies collapse into blackholes and become a spherical, concentrated form of energy, this energy is released when another gravitational blackhole ‘eddie’ forms and comes into contact with another one, as two blackholes begin to interact they release their energy in the form of galaxies, with mass producing a new state of energy along with stars. The background microwave signal and the expanding space between galaxies moving away from eachother is evidence of an on going process. 🙂
The background microwave signal […] is evidence of an on going process.
No, the background is the afterglow of what happened 13.75 billion years ago.
The fact that we can view the past at “13.75 billion years” is clear evidence of an on going process. There is no evidence of a begining, there cant be, energy can not be created or destroyed.
We are seeing the ‘surface of last scattering’ as it was 13.75 billion years ago. In one hour we are seeing it as it was 13.75 billion years + 1 hour ago. It is not exactly the same surface, but the change is so small we can’t see it. Come back in a billion years and the background is still there but have cooled and is weaker. It is like watching a hot iron cool. the process the made the iron hot is no longer ongoing.
We could jump out a billion light years in that direction and take a look to compare. I wanted to add that gravity bends and stretches light. Light is very strange stuff. There is a lot more information packed in light than we can imagine that’s 13 billion years old. In some cases the light could come out of the fiber before the light gets there and in others would never come out. … I don’t know if space is really expanding or not. Distortions in space/time I have a higher confidence in. I don’t know if based on red shift alone is enough to prove space is expanding. It’s like we are saying we were there 13 billion years ago simply because we can see it. What if there is no 0,0,0,0 location? (x,y,z,t)
Everywhere from the ‘iron’ in relative perspective, being ‘hot’ looks cool…
It would be interesting to see what it looks like now, after 13 billion years of cosmic interactions etc., but I guess that will never happen ?
” It would be interesting to see what it looks like now, after 13 billion years of cosmic interactions etc., but I guess that will never happen ”
Nope, we have one from WMAP
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/121238/ilc_9yr_moll720.jpg
And this distribution matches closely the prediction from standard cosmology theory.
The solid line is the theoretical prediction.
When I was a boy(call it 1968 or so), after I had my little 4 inch reflector scope and realized it was nowhere near big enough to see the star clusters and such I saw in the books, and heard about the big bang, I remember looking at the stars and thinking that if you could just see futher, had a really big telescope you should be able to see the remnants of the explosion.
I have been fortunate to live through such interesting times.
Space is expanding…? I’m sorry, but I can’t find any intellectual investment in an incoherent idea. Expanding relative to what? Some underlying ur-space? It is simply meaningless, and illustrates the philosophical poverty of the current paradigm. So also with “space-time,” which implies a continuum of time, and yet there is only the present moment for any of us.
There is nothing more fabulous than contemporary cosmology. It will take generations of deceased practitioners to allow a fresh look at the subject.
(By the way, I have a thick skin, from 40 years’ involvement in quantum weapons, space transportation, and other fields of practical engineering.)
Expanding relative to what?
It simply means that the distance between two objects is increasing with time. What is so hard to understand about that?
Not hard to understand at all. We normally call it “relative velocity,” not “expanding space.” It involves momentum and kinetic energy.
We normally call it “relative velocity,” not “expanding space.” It involves momentum and kinetic energy
Except in General Relativity, those concepts do not apply as ‘normally’. The galaxies are not moving through space relative to each other. Momentum and kinetic energy do not apply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space
The actual objects moving, or space expanding between them. One would be determined by time and the other one where there is no time. There would also be no way of determine a flight path or a way of getting to point a from b. When would you get there? In expanding space the arrow would never reach its target. And if there is no time in expanding space then there is no start point to the big bang. If space expands there is no reason it couldn’t contract either. You could also have areas, as I mentioned before of distortions. Some parts of space expanding and others contracting. If you see 2 galaxies colliding one could assume that space is contracting in that area. If cosmology is like quantum physics, all kinds of things are possible. If not it has to be ordered and obey laws of physics, at this level at least.
If gravity is stretching light, how do you know what you are looking at in a red shift? I don’t know which would cause a bigger headache, spooky action at a distance in quantum physics, or spooky action at a distance in cosmology. Which goes along with at every level of organization, it has all the properties of the one before while exhibiting new ones. It lends credence to all the truly strange things that happen. Bermuda triangle, ghosts, paranormal activity… all of that comes in the circle of possible. Biology is not an accident, just a way that matter evolves like salt crystals that can make elaborate designs. If it exists here it exists elsewhere . The only problem would be discontinuity. I haven’t seen any discontinuity in time. If you drew a circle which, no matter how far fetched, could happen, and outside that circle things that couldn’t, then a T Rex hunting at the local shopping mall would be expected outside the circle. The arrow of time is the biggest problem with space expanding. Of course, I thought that during the first few shakes of a nuclear explosion that time could run backwards and fowards. And even then saw nothing outside the circle of possible. You could change the future of things, but not the past. With space expanding and contracting, there is no past or future events. Everything is static. And that is somewhat hard to accept. But then you’d have distortions, nothing could ever go back to the way it was.
All of this has been clear for almost a century. There are no paradoxes or dubious corners. There are numerous books at an accessible level that make this clear, e.g. http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/ which I can warmly recommend.
I disagree there are paradoxes. There is the useful. We just ignore the nagging questions and build within the parameters. And then there are times when we address the nagging questions. It’s not wrapped up in a neat box and that’s the way it is. For all we know, we could be looking at ourselves. If space were expanding, we wouldn’t know. Even the space between atoms and at deeper structures would expand proportional. There is space in an atom. If space wasn’t/isn’t expanding equally everywhere, you’re talking about rips in the space/time continuum. And where would the production of dark matter come from to fill that space? And the production of regular matter to fill that space? And what would be either pushing or pulling the space to expand? And if there is a limit to the size of the universe, what’s on the outside of it? Summation of the linear distance equates to the speed the object is receding. Some objects would be so far away they would exceed the speed of light? It would blink out. We should be able to calculate that by taking the red shift of a nearby galaxy and not one but two other galaxies. (Verifying of course by triangulation ). That would give us an idea of where the break point is to exceed the speed of light. That would be the limit of our observable universe.
I just can’t resist.
“There is nothing more fabulous than contemporary cosmology.” On this, at least, you & I agree! It is amazing what centuries of scientific observation will come up with; it’s certainly not as though this idea of expanding space-time happened yesterday and everyone just jumped on board without questioning it.
“(By the way, I have a thick skin, from 40 years’ involvement in quantum weapons, space transportation, and other fields of practical engineering.)”
Funny thing, so do I. At least, the last two I do, the first one I’m not sure what you mean. I can say for sure that every weapon I’ve ever fired (in the Army and on my own personal time) has had some form of quantized ammunition, is that what you mean…?
Fabulous, of course, refers to imaginary worlds…
Photons, as in high-energy lasers (or nuclear devices). X-ray slap comes to mind. I confess to anticipating snarky one-upmanship from those whose expertise is maybe less than they think, so maybe I should have kept silent. I am no saint. But thanks for the agreeable spirit of discourse.
“Fabulous, of course, refers to imaginary worlds…”
Ah, of course. I guess we disagree after all. You may wish to investigate the reason we named the big telescope in the sky “Hubble” — and more to the point, why his name was the one we attached to it — before dismissing the idea of cosmological expansion out of hand. To clarify, I don’t assert that it’s necessarily 100% correct, just that it’s the idea that best fits observation at this point; the falsifying evidence to the contrary has yet to be found, but I remain open to the possibility of its existence.
“But thanks for the agreeable spirit of discourse.”
I do tend to believe that such is more conducive to the exchange of information & ideas, moreso than mudslinging in any case. And thanks for the weapons clarification: lasers I’ve played with on the comm/ranging side rather than as active weaponry, per se (I do NOT refer to hand-held “non-lethal”/”flash light” stuff airline pilots complain about); no actual nukes though, apart some of the platforms which may or may not be capable of deploying them.
Best regards!
I’m not sure how this works, but I mean to reply to Smokey’s comment of 10 Mar, 1:41 PM.
Hubble Telescope: It is true that Edwin Hubble discovered a relationship (at galactic distances) between distance and redshift. But he never accepted the idea that the redshift was the result of recession velocity (I recall reading a paper he wrote on this point, with clear arguments against it, but cannot now find the reference). It is therefore quite ironic that his name is attached to the modern premise that distance = velocity. Halton Arp’s observations put quite a kink in the assumption that redshifts are entirely due to recession. Funny thing about “falsifying evidence”: if the holders of the prevalent theory don’t want to pay attention to the evidence, no falsification is possible.
Laser Weapons: Fun stuff. Capable of surprising things.
Halton Arp’s observations put quite a kink in the assumption that redshifts are entirely due to recession
Today we have many orders of magnitude more data and they show that Arp’s observations are completely consistent with chance alignments, so there are no more any ‘kinks’ to worry about. In addition, red shifts are not measures of recession velocities [so in that sense Arp was right], as the galaxies are not moving at all. Instead, space is expanding carrying the galaxies with it like raisins is a rising raisin-bread.
I’ve wondered about this, this to me is at least a partial explanation, Let’s start that time is as much a real direction as x,y, and z, and we’re in free fall in the time dimension based on the gravitational field at that location. As gravity changes, the slope of the physical x,z and z with respect to time decreases with gravity.
This is the cause for our one way arrow of time. And why it’s not fixed, and why most physics is invariant (I think that’s the correct term) with respect to time.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes what is argued (“let’s assume time is a dimension like length, width, or depth…”). Too many readings of H. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” are persuasive, but we forget it was a work of fiction, not of physics. Time is not a direction. If it is anything, it might be considered a measure of change. We can work quantitatively with time if we can find natural processes that are describable by a theoretical relationship between the process and the passage of time (e.g., pendulums, radioactivity).
But the past is past, and the future is yet to come, so time remains a “dimension” that has no extent. (Just because we can graph things with respect to time does not mean that time is a dimension. We can graph things with respect to temperature, too, but temperature is not a dimension.)
As for the “arrow of time,” that comes from the Second Law of Thermodynamics (increase of entropy), and why certain physical processes are irreversible.
On the other hand, quantum entanglement suggests there are processes that occur over distances without the passage of time. A deep puzzle, to be sure. Make a point to live through most of this century to find out how the story progresses…
Scale is the missing factor when, (0,0,0,0) xyzt, there is a g that increases or decreases in size, space expanding as the ‘scale’ of time increases or decreases, is ‘relative’ space and time in scale also increases or decreases with ‘ relative’ perspective. Hubble and Einstine knew this but the “big bang” theory is the dumbed down catchy phrase that means “the begining of the universe… the science behind it is pretty amazing.