Big Bang Visible ?

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ScraggyDog

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Hi,
I have been musing over a question without knowing the proper answer for quite some time now and hope that someone in this community can give me some explanation or help.

I was thinking about the fact that if I were to be watching the sky one night and saw a star explode (or whatever) then it would have happened (so many) years (light years) ago/away.
Then it occurred to me that 'IF' we had a telescope powerful enough, then surely it should follow that we could observe the Big Bang ...... Not being much of an astronomer, at first I assumed that the furthest observable object would be no where near far enough to see in the past.
I've just Wiki/Googled the furthest visible object and it says it is 12 billion light years away - I compare that with when the big bang was supposed to happen = 13.7 billion light years away - hmmm not too far apart.....Which surprised me.

Could someone explain if this is theoretically possible ? And if not why... i have read into Horizon Problem but i'm not sure if this is the answer.

Regards Scraggy
 
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MeteorWayne

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All radiation from the big bang was absorbed when the first elements formed (a few hundred thousand years later). When the first stars ionized those elements, the radiation (light, radio waves, etc) could propogate across the Universe. That's as far back as we can see, the CMBR.

MW
 
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ScraggyDog

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Hi there,
I looked up the CMBR and know a little about the background radiation and how and why we can see it, but
unless i'm missing a point here I don't see how that fits in with my question. (Sorry if i've missed the point) ....(or not explained myself properly) but say the Hubble telescope could (in theory) see an object further out than the current object
(and thats 12billion light yrs away) say for theory's sake it could see 20billion light years away....Would we be able to see the big bang at 13.7 billion light yrs away and if not why? i.e. what would stop us when we can see a star 12billion light yrs away ?
I Imagine the "instant" the Big Bang took place would be imposible to see - but does it make sense that when we find further objects and yet futher again (as i'm sure we will in time) then doesn't it also mean that we would be watching an events that happened closer and closer to the Big Bang, sorry I just can't understand why it doesn't follow that we could see the big bang or at least some "effects" as we approach being able to see objects/effects 13.7billion light yrs away.

Or going off what you said could we not observe the stars ionizing as we approach the 13.7 minus a few hundred thousand years ? Maybe I should have said "Would we start to see the effects of a big bang the further back in time/distance we look?

assuming we are going to find objects even farther away in the future as technology expands and hubble gets upgraded, doesn't seem a great leap from 12billion to 13.7billion - i suppose after 13.7 we should find nothing
but maybe we will see the universe collapsing, not expanding....


Aghhhhhh it's been nagging at me for months this...Glad I finally found this forum as I have found it fascinating.
Very sorry if I didn't get the gist of your explanation MeteorWayne but i just can't see why it wouldnt be possible.



I'd be grateful if someone can come up with something that will seal the lid on this for me.....for good....
i.e. let me know if it's doo-able or not.


Regards Scrag
 
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adrenalynn

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As I understand the theory, and I'm certainly not a cosmologist:

There was a period of translucence, where it was too thick to see anything. If you think of it similar to our primordial ooze, only the primordial ooze of stars - the galaxies consumed that "ooze", that radiation in their formation leaving behind the cosmic background radiation, and some place for the radiation to come _from_.

Without that point of origin, there's nothing to look back to. So you could never peer at radiation any older than that.

The way to look beyond that is not in the cosmologic scale but rather in the sub-atomic scale. That's what the colliders are up to. Trying to reproduce the conditions just instants after the big bang. If you combine the cosmologic macro-picture with the sub-atomic micro-picture, then presumably they should mesh and you should be able to construct the whole picture up to nearly the instant of the bang.
 
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ScraggyDog

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Hi,
Thanks for explaining a little more to me, I didn't know about the thick soup of radiation, but as soon as I read your post it made me think yes of course, it would have been a hell of a bang and all kinds of radiation/matter/particles/gravity would have spilled out so it 'feels' right to me (No cosmologist here either)...I remember learning about atoms in school and even then was trying to imagine a way that electrons in orbit round a nucleus could have some connection with how the universe behaves. I was trying to make that connection because of the obvious similarity of orbits between the miniscule and Immense.....in fact I only just remembered how i'd sit making Mobious strips from paper, trying to fathom out if there could be a kind of 3 dimensional mobious strip in the universe that could some how explain how the universe expands bigger and bigger until it kind of fell into itself creating a miniscule point with ever increasing mass as other "stuff" fell into it increasing again till another BANG (big bang) - I imagined it as a kind of cycle of increasing mass (say like a black hole gathering mass from swallowing stars) until some crucial point when it all decreased mass again by exploding and speading out.
Well that was the basics anyways of Scraggy theory 1982 lol - Never did make a 3dimensional mobious strip.....But I probably went through a few hundred A4 sheets trying though - hahah

Many thanks for both your posts, I'm going to have to keep trying to understand as I can't quite grasp what you mean
yet, like when you say that the radiation was consumed, I do understand that it was consumed, and yes if I were nearby the big bang for a few million yrs I would see it slowly drain and fly off....But i'm here 13.7 billion light yrs away so from my point of view it hasn't happened yet....or has it ? - aghhhh ohhhh why do i torture myself....I'm only an electronics engineer but this has pecked at me for so long I think my brain is leaking.


Thanks guys.... I'll get there in the end, i can see im asking at the right place.
 
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csmyth3025

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ScraggyDog":5v4f7jeh said:
Hi,
Thanks for explaining a little more to me, I didn't know about the thick soup of radiation, but as soon as I read your post it made me think yes of course, it would have been a hell of a bang and all kinds of radiation/matter/particles/gravity would have spilled out so it 'feels' right to me (No cosmologist here either)...I remember learning about atoms in school and even then was trying to imagine a way that electrons in orbit round a nucleus could have some connection with how the universe behaves. I was trying to make that connection because of the obvious similarity of orbits between the miniscule and Immense.....in fact I only just remembered how i'd sit making Mobious strips from paper, trying to fathom out if there could be a kind of 3 dimensional mobious strip in the universe...
An explanation of how far back in time we can see can be found in the Wikipedia article on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB There are also links to other topics about the early universe in the box on the right at the top of the article. The following is an excerpt from that article:
The CMB gives a snapshot of the Universe when, according to standard cosmology, the temperature dropped enough to allow electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms, thus making the universe transparent to radiation. When it originated some 380,000 years after the Big Bang—this time is generally known as the "time of last scattering" or the period of recombination or decoupling—the temperature of the Universe was about 3000 K.
The bottom line is that we can't see anything "older" than the CMB.

Regarding the possibility that there exists "...a kind of 3 dimensional Mobius strip..." - what you may be thinking of is called a Klein bottle (although technically a Klein bottle is 2 dimensional - somewhat like a Mobius strip). The Wikipedia article on it can be found here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle.

Chris
 
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