Why can we still see primordial light from shortly after the Big Bang?

Question

If the universe began as a small speck (roughly 13 billion years ago?), why is primordial light from the edges of the universe just reaching us now? If that light existed near the beginning of the universe, would it not have been much closer to us and reached us much sooner? I assume the universe is not expanding at nearly light speed (in which case the light would be trying to reach us but the distance kept expanding as it approaches); but did it expand rapidly at first and then slow down?

Let me clarify; maybe I shouldn't have said PRIMORDIAL light, but rather the light from very early stars (maybe a billion years after the BB, but still less than a billion light years away from us even if the universe had expanded at almost light speed).

Answer 1

The big bang sent all the matter in the universe faster than the speed of light.. After the initial bang the masses slowed down. Allowing the light to catch up and let us see the big bang.

Think about an explosion that you see from 800 miles away. The light in this case is the matter of the universe, flug away from the blast at high speeds then slowed down quite dramaticly. A split second later you hear the boom. The boom in our case is the original light from the blast. Arriving after the bodies and masses were flung away.

Answer 2

You're right on the verge of working this out for yourself, so maybe a little nudge in the right direction will help --

Imagine that we determine the distance to some galaxy of stars that's 9-billion light years away. The important point is that this light has been traveling towards us for 9-billion years and in that time the galaxy has moved much farther away. When we first looked at the galaxy at 9-billion light years it was moving away from us at 2^11 km/sec. In a year's time it will have moved 641,510 light years farther away. In other words, even though we can see these distant objects, we can never see them where they are right NOW.

As for that "primordial" light you mentioned I think you've described what's called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. That's the remnant heat from the Big Bang. Remember that at the instant of the Big Bang time and space first came into existence. Saying that another way, the Big Bang happened every 'where' at once. Stars, planets and us came along much later, born into that 'where.'

Answer 3

We do see light emitted very close to the big bang like million years. But the actual big bang we have missed. The background radiation exist as one mentioned ear liar. There you don't see anything. There might not have been any big bang at all. We conclude from the residual microwave background radiation , that universe was quiet and uniform no lumps. But this doesn't give us any time at which it was broken. This might have broken long time ago like 100 billion years or so. So the big bang will remain a mystery and we may never know what really happened and how we evolved from a quiet universe.

Answer 4

first, light travels at a finite speed, and since the observable universe is so large, we see things as they were. more distant sources appear as they were longer ago.

second, space-time itself originated in the big bang. it was not an explosion in empty space. the big bang was the whole universe, and everywhere in the universe was once the big bang. the universe is finite yet has no edge and no center. nothing, not even space-time, exists "outside" the universe. to quote a dead writer, "there's no there, there". space-time is actually expanding at a speed greater than c, lightspeed. the universe is about 13 700 000 000 years old, but before the universe was a tiny fraction of a second old, its rate of expansion was super-fast for a very short time. this is called inflation. after that, the expansion rate slowed, but about 5 000 000 000 years ago, the expansion began to accelerate. the expansion is speeding up not slowing down.

look here:
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147
http://universeadventure.org/
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

Answer 5

We cannot see the primordial light of which speak, what we have done is measured the cosmic backgroud radiation, which is left over from the big bang.

Some current cosmology theories believe that the big bang was followed by a period of rapid expansion (inflation) which then slowed down.

Answer 6

The answer is roughly 3 degrees Celcius- this background radiation is found throuout the universe. No mater where you look this RF energy is at the same level everywhere.

Answer 7

who said we could ? and you got it backwards the light would be from the center ( point of origin) which we cannot locate cause the light passed here long ago

Answer 8

.....dude...where do you score your crack from?