You Couldn't Make This Up' Dept: "Our Universe is 150 Billion Years Old"

A team of the British, American, and Hungarian astronomers have reported that the universe is crossed by at least 13 'Great Walls', apparent rivers of galaxies 100Mpc long in the surveyed domain of seven billion light years. They found galaxies clustered into bands spaced about 600 million light years apart that stretch across about one-fourth of the diameter of the universe, or about seven billion light years. This huge shell and void pattern would have required nearly 150 billion years to form, based on their speed of movement, if produced by the standard Big Bang cosmology.

Discovery of the Great Walls of galaxies and filamentary clumping of galactic mater has greatly upset the traditional notion that galactic matter should be uniformly distributed. If the universe began with a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the awesome size of these large-scale structures is baffling because there is apparently not sufficient time available for such massive objects to form and to become organized.

The Daily Galaxy

Incredible, i swear everyday what we think we know about the universe is blown out of the water, i bet it wont be long till we find out its a trillion years old, or the ever baffling "infinite" in age.

So this seems to blow a hole in the big bang theory. We just don't know anything. More and more I realize that we are just an advanced form of apes. We really don't know anything.

reply to post by ventian


I believe everything is a theory. How long will it take us to find our beginnings and the beginnings of the Universe.

I personally believe that the Universe is infinite. It may as well be.

And IF I am right, than we will NEVER find our "beginnings" because there was no beginning. It just always was.

That is my assessment.

And I agree 100% with Ventian. We are just primitive apes and extremely ignorant.

reply to post by muzzleflash


I tend to agree that it is infinite - always was, and at the same time never was and it isn't.

Its that whole balance between chaos and control that the world seems to operate from.

Something like this intro to the Simpsons is my intuitive theory.

To me, when you look at some of the images clumped and filament models of what the universe is supposed to look like on a huge scale... only one thing comes to mind for me...

Unimaginably large neurons.

I still think the idea that the universe is just part of some huge organism and we are just the quarks and leptons (or what ever they are made up of) variant on our scale has alot of merit or the universe is us, being viewed by ourselves from the inside at one of its smallest scales.

Regardless of what it might be... the Universe will continue defy our understanding in my opinion. I just dont see how it will ever truly be understood.

There's a line of thought that says we can never ascertain the true age of the universe, because the second law of thermodynamics has erased the information necessary to determine it's age.

That's probably why Boltzmann went nuts.

It could be that the Big Bang theory is both right...and wrong.

Perhaps the Big Bang we talk about, and there seems to be evidence for, was (on a whole Universe scale) a localized event. Much in the same way that a Super Nova explosion, on a Galactic scale, is a localized event.

As, in various sections of this infinite Universe, over time Galaxies collide and increase in mass...and as within these larger Galaxies, Stars and Star Clusters collapse into Black Holes...and over more time eventually suck in all of the matter in these growing Galaxies...and over more time, eventually suck in more Galaxies (or collide with other unassociated Galaxies, as might be suggested by the ever-expanding nature of the observable Universe)

Maybe every once in a while these "mega-black holes" explode in what we think of now as a Big Bang...

This would explain the current dating of our own "local" Big Bang, while allowing for other older structures farther out in the Universe, than could be there as a result of "our" Big Bang.

Originally posted by mobiusmale
by the ever-expanding nature of the observable Universe)

Key words.

"Observable". This means there are things not observed.

What if the only thing expanding, is our knowledge or awareness of the Universe??

And every time we get better telescopes, we revise our statistics on the Universe. Looks like a pattern to me.

Wait a few years and they will revise it again when new tools are developed to study it.

Originally posted by BigfootNZ
To me, when you look at some of the images clumped and filament models of what the universe is supposed to look like on a huge scale... only one thing comes to mind for me...

Unimaginably large neurons.

I still think the idea that the universe is just part of some huge organism and we are just the quarks and leptons (or what ever they are made up of) variant on our scale has alot of merit or the universe is us, being viewed by ourselves from the inside at one of its smallest scales.

Regardless of what it might be... the Universe will continue defy our understanding in my opinion. I just dont see how it will ever truly be understood.

Ahhhhh I think my brain just melted!

What is sad is that if we were given ten dollars every year since the beginning of the universe then we still don't have enough money to rid America of it's debt.

Can we finally begin to understand that we just don't know squat?

I mean, I hear of a finding proving X, then a week later another finding disproving X. Then the next week we found out that X was just a figment of our imagination. The following week we find out that although X was just our imagination, reality is merely a construct of our collective imagination, and therefore X must still be real.

It's enough to make any somewhat rational man go bonkers.

WE DON'T KNOW PENIS.

I've felt for a long time that the universe is a lot older than it is claimed to be. Hundreds of billions or even trillions of years old would be more accurate in my opinion.

Not that I am Stephen Hawking or anything close..... But isn't there a limit to what we can actually "see" of the universe? It seems 13.1 Billion is the limit so far. www.newscientist.com... tant-object-in-the-universe-spotted.html Before that, scientists theorize that the universe was just too "dark" and stars hadn't yet formed. I wonder if we can ever look back far enough to actually "see" the Big Bang, or what if we could see beyond that????


When you start thinking about such time scales it just makes your head hurt.

WOW!
Thats is seriously amazing mind blowing.

Originally posted by muzzleflash
I personally believe that the Universe is infinite. It may as well be.

And IF I am right, than we will NEVER find our "beginnings" because there was no beginning. It just always was.

That is my assessment.

And I agree 100% with Ventian. We are just primitive apes and extremely ignorant.

Apes, NO, decendents yes, from another race of ET'

WHO ARE WE, WHERE DID WE COME FROM, WHERE ARE WE GOING?

Looks like whoever wrote the article has misinterpreted some things. The universe is estimated to be around 156 billion light years across, even though it is around 14.7 billion years old.

Regardless of how the universe was formed, science does not, and cannot, and will never, explain why everything is here in the first place.

"The universe formed as a result of the big bang," or "the universe formed as a result of [insert theory here]" doesn't address where such a mechanism or event came from in the first place or why.

Why is there anything? Science can't provide that answer.

This is hardly news. Tom Flandern, a fringe scientist, originally claimed the existence of large scale structures (Meta Research Bulletin 11, 6-13, 2002) as being problematic for the Big Bang theory. He also rejected relativity and quantum mechanics.

However the Cold Dark Matter model accounts for the formation of the large scale structures which are observed. It fits within the time frame of the Cosmological Principle.
cosmicweb.uchicago.edu...

So if you reject dark matter and dark energy you can agree with Flandern but then you have some other stuff to contend with.

But we do know the universe is big, really, really big. And we know that it's old, really, really old.

[edit on 6/17/2010 by Phage]

Originally posted by muzzleflash
"Observable". This means there are things not observed.

Because of the expansion of the universe, there is a limit to how far we can theoretically see. It's limited by two factors - the apparent age of the universe (under current theories) - as we look across great distances, we are looking very far back in time. The structures we are looking at in the ancient, ancient past (very, very far away) are much less well organized than what we see in the closer, more mature parts of the universe. This is one of the things that supports the current theories about the age of the universe. Our deepest/most ancient looks at the universe go all the way back to a few hundred million years after we believe the big bang happened, so we're getting pretty close to seeing the limit of what can be seen in that sense.

The other problem is that because the Universe is expanding in all directions at once, and the farther away things are from each other, the faster that expansion occurs. This has been observed - the red shift of the farthest galaxies from us is greater than the red shift of those closer to us. At a certain point the rate of expansion of space between two very distant objects becomes greater than the speed of light, and at that point they can no longer ever see each other again.

The Observable Universe is only one tiny percentage of the entire Universe out there. It is not only all we will ever see, but in time we will see ever less and less of it and more as more objects move past the point where they are moving away from each other at more than the speed of light. A quick google check of this stuff and I found a number that is astonishing - according to some calculations, the total size of the Universe is perhaps as much as 10ex23 to 10ex26 times as large as the Observable Universe (that's actually a lot bigger than realized until I just looked it up...).

Originally posted by pavil
Not that I am Stephen Hawking or anything close..... But isn't there a limit to what we can actually "see" of the universe? It seems 13.1 Billion is the limit so far. www.newscientist.com... tant-object-in-the-universe-spotted.html Before that, scientists theorize that the universe was just too "dark" and stars hadn't yet formed. I wonder if we can ever look back far enough to actually "see" the Big Bang, or what if we could see beyond that????

I'll have to check on this with my astrophysicist friend when he gets back into town (he's away for a while), but if I remember what he told me correctly, the limit of what we could possibly see - theoretically - is maybe something like a few hundred thousands years after the big bang as this was the point the first atoms really formed, and with it the first radiation which is what we still detect as the Cosmic Background Radiation that those guys at Bell Labs discovered. In a sense we have observed this point in time as we have now mapped the Cosmic Background Radiation, which is probably the only look we could ever have on a point this early as its when the first radiation appeared for us to now observe.

Of course, if the current model is off by 135 billion years like this article suggests is possible, then maybe none of this stuff I wrote above is correct...