This is kind of fascinating:
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has reached back 13.2 billion years — farther than ever before in time and space — to reveal a “primordial population” of galaxies never seen before.
“The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe,” the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement released Tuesday.
“This makes Hubble a powerful ‘time machine’ that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago — just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang,” the institute said in a statement released Tuesday.
Interesting stuff.
Alex S.
I’m sorry to go off-topic but you’ll LOVE the Mark Halperin quote:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/01/articles_that_make_me_believe.html#comments
donovong
Well, we all know that this is just bogus, because the universe is only about 6000 years old, right?
Michael D.
Pretty neat stuff for a telescope that has outlived its lifespan by years and started out as a piece of space junk, huh?
El Cid
NASA clearly photoshopped out the big robed hand that was retreating into the portal.
Alex S.
And to post something on-topic: in spite of the conservative yelling and screaming there are little pockets of progress everywhere. I know it’s science-fiction, but just imagine the Hubble telescope finds another Earth in some other solar system: that’s good-bye creationism. I once had a discussion with a creationist and pointed him to the hubble effect as proof of an old universe. He pulled some crazy theory about “white holes” as opposed to black holes out of his ass. I want to have an argument against “god’s chosen country”, “the shiny city on a hill” and all that, that is so in-your-face it makes their heads explode.
flukebucket
This does boggle my mind. I don’t understand it at all. It just seems to me that if the above is true then with a stronger telescope you should be able to close the 800 million year gap and witness the bang as it happened.
I truly do love this shit but I will never understand it.
Redshirt
Can someone explain to me how we can see in the past as described in the article, IF we are all composed of material created in the Big Bang, and expanding ever since.
Would we not be on an expanding “bubble” of space, and thus, how would it be possible to look back?
The only answer I can come up with, and it might be correct, is the speed of the expansion of space-time is far, far, far faster than the speed of light – thus, we can look back into time i.e. seeing light from far distances.
Redshirt
@Alex S.: I used to believe discovery of life on Mars, or an earth in a different solar system would be the death knell of our old religious traditions.
BUT! Having ridden the wingularity these past few years, I no longer doubt the capacity of these folks to justify anything, to accept an infinite amount of cognitive dissonance in their heads.
Thus, it’s far more likely the response will be: We got to spread the word of Christ to those heathen alien bacteria!
SGEW
@Redshirt:
Bafflingly, I believe that this is more or less correct, according to current thinking. I could be very very wrong, tho’.
dmsilev
@flukebucket: Yes and no. One problem is that when you get into the very early universe, there’s not much in the way of discrete objects to look at. Not enough time to form galaxies, and anything much smaller/dimmer didn’t put out enough light to give us a fighting chance of seeing it.
Instead, we can look at the residue of the Big Bang itself, the cosmic microwave background. By looking at slight variations in that background, we can get an idea of the overall structure of the universe in its very early days. It’s akin to looking at a set of scorch marks on a wall and reconstructing the shape of the hand grenade that detonated in the room a few days earlier.
-dms
me
You can’t (for the most part) because the cosmic background radiation obscures everything behind it at about 400,000 years after the big bang.
Hiram Taine
@flukebucket:
The universe was opaque to photons for about 380,000 years after the Big Bang and for most of the rest of the time between then and 600 million years there wasn’t anything organized enough (galaxies) to see with our present day optical telescopes.
We actually can “see” the 380,000 year point after the BB by observing the cosmic microwave background since this is the vastly red shifted photons released once the universe became transparent to them. It’s interesting that evidence of sound waves, the “echo” of the BB has been observed in the CMB..
Wikipedia has a timeline of the Big Bang that might make things a bit more understandable for you..
Xanthippas
It is true, the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. However, we see objects as they were in the distant past because the light they generated at the time is just now reaching us.
Xanthippas
@Hiram Taine:
That timeline of the Big Bang is fascinating. Obviously we want to understand the formation of the universe, but just ponder those theories about how the universe will end for a minute. The timescales are unimaginable, and try to wrap your head around the idea of a “vacuum metastability event.”
Redshirt
Well, if that is really the answer then (space-time expansion faster than speed of light), than I understand it! Awesome.
Which, of course, leads me to firmly believe Warp Drive is inevitable.
MattF
The ‘age’ of light collected by the Hubble is determined by looking at its red-shift. This is why the new data is infrared– it’s shifted into much longer wavelengths than you’d see in ‘younger’ photons.
PK
The thing I have never understood about the big bang theory is how the entire universe existed (prior to the big bang) in basically a highly condensed form the size of a small dot, and then an explosion occurred and the universe was created.
There is no answer as to what was there before the big bang, nor how can all this matter be present in such a small form, or how can something come out of nothing. Or at least there are no answers that I can understand.
It is almost easier to understand that there is a god character who created the universe. I like to think of it as a magician in a hat who points to the dot and says Abracadabra!
MattF
@PK
You’re right that no one has explained how something comes from nothing. But you have to bear in mind that everything started at the big bang, including time. So, there was no ‘before’ the big bang, because there was no ‘before’.
boomshanka
i bet i can see russia from my porch with a telescope like that.
Tom Levenson
@Alex S.: The space telescope is unlikely/incapable to image exo-earths (except by a fluke of a transit across the face of a nearby star aligned just right, which is not usually what you use that precious platform to observe — and there is another space observatory, Kepler, actually designed to do that).
That said, exoplanets approaching the size and density of earth have been detected indirectly, using the doppler shift technique. (Note that the planet at the end of that link is more or less earth scale — but orbits very close to the sun and is therefore not a candidate for an exo-eden.
Rather, what you need is a much bigger light bucket (a telescope with a larger diameter which would increase the sensitivity of doppler shift measurements. Thus the interest in the oft delayed Webb Space Telescope .
Lastly, to detect evidence of life as opposed to the physical conditions that we know can support life, based on our only data point, the most promising approach is spectroscopy — using an instrument to detect the chemical composition of the atmosphere of a potentially living planet. That needs both a lot of photons (hence the size of the light bucket — here probably an array of telescopes organized into an interferometer.
You also need luck — the right geometry so that one can image an atmosphere backlit but not obscured by the light of its parent star. This has been done for one of the “hot Jupiter” exoplanets, but it ain’t going to drop into anyone’s lap.
All of which is to say that I expect to hear of the detection of an atmospheric chemistry suggestive of life in my own lifetime, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I am disappointed.
Tom Levenson
@Redshirt: At the risk of self aggrandizement, you can get a partial explanation of what happened at 380,000 years after the Big Bang by looking at a film I made a few years ago for NOVA. It’s hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson and is viewable online here.
The short form: At that time “recombination” took place. That was the moment when the early universe cooled enough to allow the plasma of electrons whizzing about and protons and neutrons to settle into stable atoms of mostly hydrogen and some helium (and a skosh of lithium, I believe).
When those atoms formed, the universe became “transparent.” That is, with all the ordinary matter in the universe ionized, photons — light — kept bouncing off charged particles. Once the universe settled into neutral atoms, those photons could travel unimpeded: that moment, and it happened very, very fast, is what gets imaged when you take a picture of the cosmic background radiation. Because every photon involved is on a trajectory shaped by its last collision before recombination, the pattern of brighter and darker spots tells you where stuff was clumping together at that early stage — and gives you a way to measure all kinds of properties of the early universe.
After recombination, however, as a commenter pointed out above, none of those clumps were yet particularly interesting — not dense enough to radiate any energy. The universe was hence dark, until enough giant stars (and or protogalaxies) had formed to “reionize” the universe — and shine with enough brightness to be detectable at this late date.
Or at least that’s how I remember it all from my last bout with popularizing cosmology.
GranFalloon
PK – I’ve struggled with that too, and I’ve read every “Physics for Morons” book out there to try to sort through it. It’s very difficult to conceptualize and I won’t pretend to try to explain it (since I can’t). I do know, however, that it helps me to consider that the “dot” did not exist within some space-time framework, but rather that the dot contained all space and – this is harder – all time as well. Yikes. So there isn’t even a “vacuum” in which the dot existed – the dot was everything. And, not only was there anything outside the big bang, there was no “before” the big bang since time did not exist before it. Not only that, but here’s one more – cause and effect was created in the big bang. So we keep getting to this point beyond which you can’t look – not because it’s secret, but because there’s nothing to look at.
Things definitely get weird at that point, especially when you talk about pure energy at the beginning and things so small. Even now, the smaller things are, the less “predictable” they are in the sense of whether they will be where they are supposed to be and do what they are supposed to do. The fact that my house exists as it does every day when I come home is not a constant, it’s just that the chances of there being reorganizations, quantum shifts, etc., of something that big are extremely unlikely. At the tiniest planck length (light photon size) things go nuts and don’t adhere to our concepts of cause and effect, time passage, and the like.
I’m a spiritual person and like the concept of a higher power. But we can just as easily assume that at the moment of creation something occurred that we don’t have the power currently to understand.
PK
This is the point which makes no sense. Its very difficult to wrap one’s mind around the fact that so much of what we see around us, as well as time itself essentially came into existence spontaneously, out of nothing. I remember being told in science classes that nothing exists in a vacuum. Maybe they should have added that the universe however, was created from a vacuum.
This is where I think religious people are being so dumb. They should simply accept everything that scientists say about the big bang and the universe, but add God into the mix prior to the big bang. Of course God created the universe, the big bang was just the process of creation. No one will be able to prove otherwise.
chopper
@PK:
actually it makes perfect sense. there is no ‘before the big bang’ any more than there’s ‘north of the north pole’. if you walk north to the north pole and cross it, you’re now heading south.
cmorenc
Just with a humble 12-inch aperture reflector telescope…wait, I can do it too with my even humbler 90mm refractor…from my somewhat light-polluted suburban driveway, I can easily see other galaxies that are eight million light-years years away, i.e. eight million years into the past, and globular clusters that are ten to forty thousand years (i.e. light-years) into the past, before the dawn of human civilization. On better nights with my 12″ reflector, I can see other galaxies that are 25 million light years, and some that are 50 million years into the past (i.e. light-years away). Much better, of course from a darker site.
True, my scopes can’t come anywhere close to the sort of virtual “time travel” into the distant past of the universe that Hubble is capable of. But it’s still thrilling to contemplate even an eight million year sort-of-wormhole into the past right in front of my eyes, right in my own side yard, on clear nights.
What’s as staggering as the sheer ancientness of the light I’m seeing from these distant galaxies is how incomprehensibly immense these objects (which have the apparent size of small thumbnails, or perhaps glowing pieces of lint in the eyepiece at 50-100x). Light takes longer to traverse from one side to the other of these glowing embers of another “island universe” similar to our home Milky Way galaxy, than the entire history of human civilization several times over. That’s not time from there to us, that’s just time for light to get across these 30,000 to 100,000 light-year diameter behemoths, each teeming with a hundred billion to several hundred billion stars.
New Yorker
Durned elitist lib’ruls need to stop blaspheming by claiming the universe is that old and get out and shoot some moose like real ‘murkans.
Paul in KY
Remember, the universe is expanding into ‘not-space’ for lack of a better term. Evidently, in ‘not-space’ matter can travel faster than the speed of light.
However, it seems that within the confines of our universe, matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light.
Therefore, no warp drive (at least within our universe).
Bummer.
Foxhunter
@Tom Levenson:
Another reason why I read BJ comments. Thank you for your link, Tom.
I found this posted comment on the CNN Hubble article quite humorous, by one MissNorth:
cmorenc
@PK
I agree completely. Many religious people miss the obvious point that the “intelligent design” of the deity IS the framework of natural physical laws our science has been in the progressive process of discovering over the past five hundred years or so. They also miss the point that the Bible/Koran etc. are works focused on moral/ethical instruction, not on attempting to be science manuals.
Too many religious people are too deeply invested in wanting to believe in a “hocus pocus” religio-Harry-Potter like theory of God where physics-defying miracles are the normal mode of operation for God to prove he/she is, well…God. They think that if somehow God only chooses to operate consistent with the physical nature of the universe God created, well then, that doesn’t sound like God much at all to them. The laws of physics and the natural world are plenty awesome and mysterious enough to reflect a splenderously powerful, intelligent deity, if that’s the way one wishes to interpret it, and it takes nothing away whatsoever from the concept that God also wishes intelligent beings to follow certain moral imperatives, although working out the good vs evil thing is still a complicated Gordian knot to work out even under this view.
Hiram Taine
@PK:
Or you could think of it as Isaac Asimov did in The Last Question.
ETA: If you happen to read that, note the copyright date, Asimov was way ahead of his time..
Tom Levenson
@Foxhunter: My pleasure (and kind of my day job too.)
Redshirt
@PK:
The concept of the Singularity might help. Singularity = science has no idea. Basically, a point of no dimensions, yet with seemingly infinite (or for our purposes, approximating infinity) density.
These are found at the center of black holes, so there is something we can theoretically test regarding the Big Bang, if, as believed, it began as a Singularity.
I think the likely answer to the “How” is multiple dimensions – specifically the singularity was the contact spot with another dimension, and the energy of that collision caused the Big Bang (M Theory, or Brane Theory). In this theory, our reality, and universe, exists entirely on a membrane, one of countless other membranes in higher dimension. These membranes can sometimes interact and the interaction causes universes to come into being.
No idea how anyone would test that.
And if there are extra-dimensional explanations for all this, then Warp Drive is possible if it’s able to use extra-dimensional space.
Redshirt
@Tom Levenson: Thanks for the link Tom. I can’t watch at work, but plan on watching all those videos tonight. I am an absolute sucker for all this. Love it.
Feel free to post any other links of interest, since you obviously know your stuff.
Phil P.
Ha! I’ve wondered for years about the same thing as flukebucket in #6 above. Thanks to Tom Levenson and others for a cogent explanation. Gotta love that you can get these questions answered at Balloon Juice.
A related question I’ve also been curious about for a long time: Is there an identifiable center away from which all the “stuff” in the universe is moving? This would presumably be the “location” at which the Big Bang happened, right? (Loosely speaking, I realize, given that space-time was created at that moment.)
GranFalloon
@Phil P – I believe that all matter and energy is moving away from all other matter and energy. Sort of like raisins in a loaf of bread when baked. This would make sense, of course, since all matter and energy were in the same place (so, sort of “everywhere all the time) at the moment of creation).
Reks
I’ll admit to not being very science smart and knowing nothing about space. If we can see the past with Hubble why can’t we focus that thing at some point and see what’s ahead of us (the future) in time and space?
As in, why is the Earth’s location in the universe the known present? I feel dumb even asking this
Cat
@PK:
My understanding there was no ‘matter’ as we understand it. It was all energy very tightly packed into space. As it expanded it allowed the energy to spread out more which in turn led it to be less energetic and that allowed it to form into the particles that make up what we now call matter.
Phil P.
@GranFalloon: Thanks. I’m going to have to think about the raisin bread analogy for a while.
GranFalloon
@Reks – First, the reason we “see” into the past is because it takes a long time for light to reach us. Conceptualize it as this – telescopes don’t “see far away,” they “gather light.” Older light is fainter and harder to gather but a powerful telescope can gather it. We’re not really watching the past happen in the “movie” sense, we’re just now receiving the light given off by the old events. Light is the “messenger” of what happens and, when messengers have to travel great distances, their “news” is old. When In a sense, we’re always “watching the past” – the light from your TV takes a tiny fraction of a second to get to you, but it is still time. So you’re watching what happened on your TV about a trillionth of a second ago and, as such, are looking into the past. “Looking into the future” is mathematically possible but would require some way of moving faster than light, which is not possible. I think.
Also, the earth is not the center – it’s merely our own frame of reference. If there are people on the stars that Hubble is seeing, and they have their own telescope, they’re seeing earth billions of years ago.
slag
@Tom Levenson: I knew I liked you. We own that video. And Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my favorites! I love when he hangs out in Central Park and debunks stuff for random passersby. We need more of that.
I half-expected to see a picture of Tunch in this post.
thomas Levenson
@slag: Hey — may your tribe ever increase. (My royalty on that video is on the order of .75, I think — which in these times I will take, thank you very much.)
Seriously — glad you liked it, and I’m honored you did so enough to take it into your home. Neil is one of the great science communicators working today. A good guy too.
Cat
@Phil P.:
I’ve always been told there is no way for us to know when I ask this question.
The whole known universe is moving so there is no way to tell if an object is moving towards you at 60mph and you are not moving or if you are moving away from it at 20mph and its moving towards you at 80mph.
GranFalloon
@Phil P.
I think that works. The analogy is at least useful – but of course breaks down, because in our framework, there is no oven in which the bread bakes. The “crust” of the bread is the limit of the known universe, and it’s not expanding into the oven but rather into “anti-raisinbread.” (what a frightening thought).
PK
I think the reason why we are looking back in time is because of the speed of light. A light year is the distance light travels in one year. So the farther an object is from the earth the longer light from that object takes to reach us. The nearest star from us is 4 light years away, so light from that star takes 4 yrs to reach us. When we see that star we are actually seeing what it was like 4 yrs ago. When we see an object 7-8 billion light yrs away, then we are looking that far into the past.
Actually when we look up at the stars at night we actually look at the past.
I am not sure how you could find a point in the future though. The only way time travel is actually possible is if we built a space ship which travels at the speed of light. I read in an astronomy book once that if astronauts were to go and come back at the speed of light to proxima century (the nearest star) they would have aged only 8 yrs, but when they come back, the earth would have aged 50,000 yrs. A kind of time travel I suppose.
Of course I did not understand how that was possible. Apparently Einstein’s theory of relativity explains it.
Redshirt
What really blows my mind is relativity – to wit, everything, absolutely everything is moving, right now. To look at it simply, the earth is spinning, orbiting the sun, the sun is orbiting the galactic center, the milky way is in an orbit with Andromeda around a shared gravitational spot, and I assume these orbits go on, ever bigger — making everything one giant gravity well?
But at the same time as these orbits, there are other motions – expansion of space-time, left over energy from a supernovae, result of galactic collision, etc.
And so on, such that if everything is in a state of movement, then clearly everything is relative at our level – but my confusion stems from, are there any absolute motions at any level? And, a question: Could gravity simply be the force of acceleration of all these various motions?
slag
@thomas Levenson:
I like that term “science communicators”. The title should come with a badge. And maybe a bullhorn.
I’ve always found communication of technical concepts fascinating. It seems to vacillate wildly between being hyper-theoretical (almost meaninglessly so) and hyper-technical (with alpha, gammas, and omegas whizzing by out of reach). It seems particularly challenging to reach that middle ground where it becomes both accessible and meaningful to people of average intelligence (like me!). In other words, a good documentary can be hard to find.
MattF
@Redshirt
No, gravitation is real. The principle of equivalence says that the physical effect of gravitation at any particular point in space can be zeroed out by an ‘equivalent’ free-fall acceleration. But the global effect of gravitation cannot be zeroed out.
GranFalloon
@ Redshirt – the concept of “Absolute” movement is irreconcilable with relativity. Indeed, the two terms linguistically collide – absolute vs. relative. Because the universe is expanding, everything is always moving. More importantly, there is no stationary framework outside the motion that could serve as a reference point to the movement within the universe.
In response to your other question, as I recall relativity says that gravity itself is not a true force, and is only acceleration. Large objects that create gravitational pull are really warping spacetime around them, so that when a thing moves nearby, it’s not sucked in – it’s following the curve of spacetime that the large object creates.
Here’s a way to look at it, which helps me, at least in two dimensions. Stretch a rubber sheet tight. Roll a marble (the earth) across it. It travels in a straight line. Then put a large heavy ball in the center (the sun). Roll the marble again. It travels straight until it gets into the “dent” caused by the “sun.” With enough energy (and no competing forces), it would circle around the “sun” forever in the sun’s “divot.” Hard to conceptualize in three dimensions (really four, including time) but it kinda helps.
@MattF – is this inconsistent with what you said?
MattF
@Redshirt
Gravitation is a force, but it’s a force whose effect can be detected only by looking at relative quantities. So, a single test mass in a gravitational field will seem to be in free-fall, but a set of test masses (say, arranged in a cube) will gradually distort– and the rate and shape of that distortion gives you the value of the gravitational field at the center of the cube.
Hiram Taine
@PK:
I think you misread that or misremember it.. At the speed of light no subjective time at all passes to go any distance.. From the photon’s point of view it travels across the universe instantaneously.
The closer you get to light speed the greater the time dilation and the shorter time the trip seems to take from your point of view.
There are a bunch of calculators for Science Fiction writers here and you can enter velocities (in decimal fractions of lightspeed “C”) into the time dilation calculator and find out that at 0.99 times the speed of light time slows by a factor of about 7 for the passengers on the vessel and at 0.999 C the ratio is about 22:1.
Hiram Taine
@Reks:
No matter what direction we look in, the light is coming to us from that direction and it travels at a constant speed so for any given distance it takes a set amount of time to get to us.
It works the same way as sound waves, no matter what direction the lightning flash is, you always hear the thunder after the lightning.
PK
Its quite possible that I misunderstood it, because I read the book way back in the past . However this article seems to be saying the same thing as I read.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/through.html
Paul in KY
Hiram, I think you missed the crux of PK’s comment. PK didn’t realize that anything with mass greater than a photon cannot travel at the speed of light.
So, instead of saying the astronauts traveled at speed of light to Proxima Centauri, substitute them traveling at .99 speed of light & I think it would take them roughly 10 years or so to make it there & back.
Now on Earth alot more time would have passed. How much? I don’t know, although I think it would be much less than 50,000 years.
flukebucket
@Reks:
How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I am facing?
Seriously guys, I do appreciate the links and the discussion. I have the NOVA link loaded up and ready to go as soon as I can get the opportunity to sit and watch it. This is fascinating stuff to me but way, way out of my league.
I do get a kick out of looking at the pictures though.
TruthOfAngels
@Redshirt:
You look into the past every time you look at the stars. When you look at 61 Cygni, for instance, you’re looking at an ancient age where America had a budget surplus. Crazy, but true.
Redshirt
@MattF: MattF – can you explain this in more detail, if possible? Because, at least in a Special Relativity sense, my idea of gravity is much more like GranFaloon is talking about @48 – that it’s not a force, but rather a description of the effect of curved space-time.
Now, I know Newtonian gravity, and Quantum gravity are thought to act like forces. But I did not think this was the case with Relativity.
Brachiator
@cmorenc:
I blame Aristotle.
And Canada.
MattF
@Redshirt
It’s an area where you can get into arguments, depending on what you mean by ‘force’. My own view is that ‘force’ is a primitive, undefined notion in physics (a ‘push’ or a ‘pull’, if that helps), and ‘acceleration’ is simply one of various possible descriptors of the motion you get when you exert a force on an object. So, my evasive answer to your question is that, yes, gravity is a force, but no, I’m not going to tell you what I mean by that– because I can’t.
Redshirt
@MattF: Fair enough, let’s see if we’re on the same page: My understanding of gravity is there is no definitive theory. Different theories work in different situations (for example, the Newtonian conception of gravity works perfectly most of the time for things here on earth, but does not work for the GPS system), but no one theory works in every situation. Thus, gravity is still a theory that has a lot yet to be discovered.
Semi-relatedly, it seems to me evolution as a theory is much more solid than the different theories of gravity.
MattF
Well, Einstein’s field theory reduces to Newton’s field theory in the non-relativistic limit, so, strictly speaking, there’s no case where Newton’s theory works and Einstein’s theory doesn’t.
Moreover, as far as I know, there’s no data that contradicts Einstein’s theory– and, there’s quite a bit of confirming data, but not enough to eliminate all possible alternatives. There are still various situations (e.g., gravitational waves) where the differences between Einstein’s theory and alternative theories are too small to measure.
Redshirt
To clarify, Einstein’s theory is more precise, and there are situations we now face where the degree of accuracy of Newton’s theory is not sufficient – the GPS system, for example. So it’s a matter of precision, and not correctness.
Darryl
If you think any evidence will deflate the creationists, you are not very familiar with them.
Thanks to inflation, sufficiently distant parts of the universe did expand from each other faster than the speed of light, for a short period of time, and thus haven’t been in causal contact. We are on an expanding bubble of space, but space is now expanding so slowly that there’s a lot of stuff close enough to see, though it’s taken billions of years for the light to get here. Beyond a certain range, though, light hasn’t had time to get here, and it’s unknown how much stuff is in that region. But even if things weren’t expanding, we would still be looking at the past, because light travels at a finite speed.