Universe is 13.8 billion years old.... how can we see light from 13.5 billion years ago?

If the universe is 13.8 billion years old.. and we are only able to see 13.5 billion light years.

A.2. Mean that if those 300 million years of light passes us that we will be able to see in a specific point in space those extra 300 million years somehow warp via gravity around a black hole etc and know they are the 300 million years we are missing from the 13.5 billion years we can see in the other direction?

Does it:

A. Mean we will never see the other 300 million years as the light from the first 300 million years has passed us since we are not moving at the speed of light?

B. We do not currently have a space telescope that has enough detection to see light from 13.8 billion years ago?

C. There was a dark period of 300 million years where light and light from things like stars didnt exists and therefore we can only see 13.5 billion years into the past and will never see the big bang?

This is section two which are just standard questions i am wanting to be amswered.

2.A. how fast is the universe expanding compared to how fast light is travelling through empty space...aka a vacuum.

2.B. how fast are we travelling compared to light?
2. B2. How fast are we travelling compared to the universe expansion rate, light, and gravity waves?

3. If gravity waves actually travel and are measured by bending space (or creating ripples in the fabric of space), thwn wouldnt that actually be faster that light due to the fact that light travels through space, but gravity waves travel by bending the very fabric of space that light travels upon?

4. I am quite drunk so place don't be too harsh on me. I actually read a google answeer to the last question ages ago but have forgotten the reasoning behind it.

Thanks so much if you can legit answer these. Cheers
Wish you all the best.
DaRAGE

a reply to: DaRAGE

Man, these questions.. no one can answer.

But talk about instant conniption ..

The universe, so vast. compelling.. yet, the infinitely small, equally as compelling..

Only through the observation of the nots, do we see the do's..

good thinking..

a reply to: DaRAGE
We're actually able to see 46 billion light years away! And we're able to do that because the universe has been expanding at faster than light speed.

medium.com...

www.forbes.com...

But the universe doesn't look a day over 2 billion.

a reply to: wildespace

If the universe is 13.8 billlion years old.... how are we able to see 46 billion ligjt years away? I mean if we are expanding at the speed of light we would be able to see possibly 14.8 billion years on one direction.... and possibly 13.8 billion years in another direction. If we were in the middle point of two big bangs 27.8 billion light years apart that exploded simultaneously.


Sorry man i didnt read before anaqering... but thank you. I will read your post tomorrow. Those answers aka links will help me... cheeeers

a reply to: DaRAGE

The universe is expanding FASTER than light, stretching the wavelengths of light as it goes. Which is why we can see further than 13.8 BY.

As far as I know, at least.

Maybe shortly after the bigbang things were too dense and hot for it to properly 'render' ?

a reply to: Alexander the Great

Man i was sure we could only see 13.5 billion years inti the past even though there is a section of space that somehow measured wider than that. Though that actually beffkes me mire now that i think about it. My original queation equals wrong. I still dont gwt how we can see 46 billion light years if the universe is 13.8 billion years old. Even if the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.... light only travells at the speed of light. So if we see light from 13.8 billion light years away... then.... i find ot hard tooo. Well im drunk. I might write more tomorrow after i actually read you post and get more informed than i currently.am. love u long time, DaRAGE

a reply to: Alexander the Great

I don't think we can see further than 13.8 billion light years yet.

But those galaxies we are seeing at that distance will now be about 46 billion light years away (if the universe was expanding at a constant rate)

So the universe should be at least 92 billion light years across by now, but probably bigger.

a reply to: DaRAGE

I don't think light existed back then so there's no option to see it.
Something about the universe being dense plasma maybe?

Can't remember the exact reason but light either couldn't travel through or didn't exist in whatever the early universe was.

originally posted by: Jubei42
Maybe shortly after the bigbang things were too dense and hot for it to properly 'render' ?

Just after the Great Expansion , as some theories go , there was a period of "nothing happening" . A couple of blank pages in the book.

a reply to: DaRAGE

Actually, we can only see and measure that part of the total universe which we are at the center of.

It would not be beyond possibility for there to be much much more "stuff" out there, of which we will never become aware.

If it is 18.5 or 46 billion light years, there could be a lot more.

a reply to: DaRAGE

2.A. how fast is the universe expanding compared to how fast light is travelling through empty space...aka a vacuum.

According to some , space is expanding at faster than light speed. And , the key word there is SPACE.

2.B. how fast are we travelling compared to light?

About 515,000 mph
That answers most of your questions

3. If gravity waves actually travel and are measured by bending space (or creating ripples in the fabric of space), thwn wouldnt that actually be faster that light due to the fact that light travels through space, but gravity waves travel by bending the very fabric of space that light travels upon?

Gravity waves are bound by the same speed limit as anything else
Gravity waves do not "bend" the space time fabric . Mass does.

Now , can I rest and cool my brain ?
I am an old fogey after all

a reply to: DaRAGE

If space is expanding, the light has more distance to travel. I would surmise that, as the universe expands, the loss of light would increase as more and more red-shifts before it reaches us and result in a loss of range in the observable universe.

The premise of the universe being ~13.8 billion years old is based on the limits of the observable universe. In actuality, we don't know the age of the universe and the theoretical diameter of the universe is ~90 billion light years.

Interesting thread.

a reply to: Krahzeef_Ukhar

This is really close, really really close to the truth.

There was a period in the history of the universe where there were no atoms, where everything was just particles, and those things that we understand to be components of atomic nuclei in this era, just mingled about, all of a randomness.

During this time, photons did exist, but so did electrons, and those electrons were not bound up around atomic nuclei, because none had yet formed. What used to happen is that light never used to travel all that far, because each photon would only get so far before bumping into an electron and skewing off in a totally different direction. We know light these days as beams that travel in straight lines for the most part, unless they interact with something that bends their pathway through reality, like a gravity source or a prism of some sort. But that was not the case in the very, very early universe.

In fact, at one point, the mess of stuff that became this universe was so tightly packed that any shock to it, would actually produce a very strange kind of sound wave, called a Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation. Those are interesting in and of themselves, and I advise giving them a good, firm googling at some point, if you REALLY want your noggin scrambled.

In any case, light existed at that time, but it could not travel in the constant fashion that we are used to in this era. That whole period in universal history was to all intents and purposes, alien to our way of thinking on these matters. Nothing was familiar about the behaviour of the things we rely on to measure the scale and state of the universe, so its necessary for different ways of thinking to be adopted in order to probe the mysteries of that period.

To answer a lot of why we can only see back to 300 million years after the Big Bang: PBS Spacetime, Space Used to be Orange

The fist stars did not form until around 100 to 200 Million years after the big bang.

The early universe was too energetic for Photons to freely move about, making the universe opaque like fog. It wasn't until 350,000 years after the Big Bang that the universe cooled to a point that allowed photons to move freely, making the Universe the transparent one we see today.

But those photons from back them have been redshifted so far (their wavelengths stretched as the universe expands) that those photons are microwaves rather than visible light. That is the cosmic microwave background, or CMB.

The photons of light from the first stars would not be in this backgorund becuase, as I said, those first stars came a couple hundred million years later. The light from the first stars are also reshifted, but not as much, so those photons are in the infrared.

So we can in fact see the light from the very early universe, before stars, and those photons are the Cosmic Microwave Background (although we need a microwave telescope to see those photons).

B. We can see the conditions of the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. Not via only visible light, but also radiation. Specifically the cosmic microwave background radiation.

C. We will never see the light from the big bang...as it wasn't an explosion, but an expansion. And astrophysicists normally speak of the 'observable universe ' when talking about exactly what we will ever be able to see. Since the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, there are galaxies and visual phenomena which we will never see.


Gravity waves do travel through spacetime at the speed of light .
They are measured by lasers who's photons shift die to the stream of the waves, but the equipment doesn't 'bend' through spacetime. The fabric or geometric matter around us all get distorted uniformly , you wont notice.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
This is really close, really really close to the truth.

hehehe nice.
I checked out Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation a very little bit.

I'm not quite at the level of misunderstanding it yet but I'll be trying.

It's a bit like those really long names full of impossible combinations of consonants in sci-fi novels or the former Yugoslavia - you just have to accept it and not try too hard to work it out or your brain will explode.