The Big Bang occured in one place billions of years ago, but how did we get here before the light did?

Question

We hear every day that Scientists are seeing stars that are very very old (billions of years old), and that they're seeing into what existed close to the Big Bang. If our solar system was part of that Big Bang, how did we get here before the light from that star did.

Does our galaxy travel in the opposite direction so close to the speed of light that it's taken light billions of years for that light to catch up with us?

Answer 1

Good question. The BB (remember: it's a *theory*) didn't occur in one place! but everywhere at once. According to the theory, all of space (and so everything in it) expanded at once.

Light, on the other hand, takes time to travel. You are hearing about systems that are *so far away* that their light took a long time to arrive here. Sometimes that travel time is so long that the light must have been created not too long after the BB.

It takes a while to get a handle on the BB idea. This article might help: http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm
Note that it says: "The Big Bang actually consisted of an explosion of space within itself"

Answer 2

Relativity is the answer. If this sounds familiar, great, if not, read up on Einstein. I recommend wikipedia or any other internet source; most concepts are not too hard to follow.

I'll start with the second question. The answer is no. According to relativity, light travels at the same speed no matter how fast you are moving. You could be moving at .99 the speed of light away from it, and it would appear to move towards you just as fast as if you were standing still. This means that no matter what speed you travel at, light always will travel towards you at a constant rate. Instead, the stars that we look at billions of years old are billions of light years away, meaning that billions of years ago, they would've appeared black (not actually because they were closer then, but for our sake yes) because light from them had not reached us.

Now for the first question. Our solar system was part of the big bang, and if you find some original specks of dust responsible for out solar system, and look at how the light hits from this star that's now billions and billions of years old hits it, you'll see the answer. In the big bang, the entire universe was really close. Immediately after, it started expanding at near the speed of light. But things were still "relatively" close, and light would catch up quickly to things that exploded in the same general direction. But these things drifted farther and farther apart as the exansion continued, the light would take longer and longer to reach things, and the light reaching the planet could not keep up with the light leaving, and we would see farther back in time.

It's sort of like having two friends walking in sort of the same direction, but a slightly different angle. One throughts a tennis ball for the other to catch, throwing one each second, and at the same speed. As they drift farther apart, the tennis ball catcher starts getting one less than every second, because the balls are in the air for a while longer. If it went on in big bang scale, soon the balls would take a billion years to fly through the air, and the catcher would have balls that would have been thrown a billion years ago, which is relatively close to the time they were together. Hope that helps somewhat; it's confusing stuff sorta!

Answer 3

No we cant see the big bang. But we can see the stars few billion years old. Since they continue to emmit light. If they are say 5 billion light yeras away then we can see what happened 5 billion years ago since the light is passing us now.
Regarding the bigbang ... What they see is the the cosmic microwave background – a kind of residual glow of the Big Bang that is left in the space, not the light produced at the time of big bang.

Answer 4

what they mean by that is that those galaxies are so far away that the light takes so long to reach us that it is like seeing back in time. Those galaxies may have ceased to exist millions of years ago, maybe billions of years ago. So they are not talking about seeing something close to the big bang in space but in time. the big bang happened every where at the same time. space and time did not exist before the big bang. it was a singular event. If you don't understand and need more of an explanation I suggest reading Steven Hawking's a brief history of time or some of the simpler texts that try to put this in simple terms. or email me.

Answer 5

We can't see back to the big bang because the universe was opaque for the first million years or so. The cosmic microwave background radiation is the severely red-shifted glow from the early universe when it first became transparent. So no, we didn't outrun the light.

Answer 6

We traveled in one direction and the light in the other?
There is still even radiation throughout the universe from the big bang

Answer 7

i thought about this once, and this is what i came up with:

As the universe expanded, SPACE ITSELF also expanded. That is, the space between two particles of matter could be expanding faster than the speed of light, although the matter itself cannot go that fast. That is how the matter of our galaxy got here before light from the big bang.

i'm not sure if that's right or not, but it kinda makes sense to me.

Answer 8

no the answer is a higher being made us god im christian u may not go with my answer but a germ cant just make itself it has to have something to start from and whatever it was cant start itself and how can trees be around if there isnt a seed a germ cannot make a seed without something and that something cant be made on its own apes evolved into humans? no because if they did there would be no more apes they hav the brain like a human but humans dont descend from apes that descend from sea critters. and plus how can a germ make skin and blood and brains and muscles it cant do it without the help with something that is above any scientists god so just think about it.

Answer 9

My thought is that the fabric of space stretched and while we could only move so fast relative to the fabric of space we got carried along with it.

I more or less agree with vtbmann.

Answer 10

We are on the inside trying to look out. So the further out we look, the future back in time we can see.