With a big enough telescope, would we see further than 13.7 billion light years away? What will we see?

Question

I was reading this article
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2007/05/liquid_telescope

and thought that eventually telescopes will be powerful enough to see farther than 13.7 billion light years away. If the universe is 13.7 billion years old, then what do we see if we have a telescope that can see 14 billion+ light years away? Pitch black? Is that even physically possible?

Answer 1

The farthest signal we can see is the microwave background radiation. this is not a matter of how powerful a telescope is; but a consequence of the fat that earlier than that, the density and temperature of the Universe were too high to let any signal pass. And this was a few thousand years AFTER the "0 moment" of the Big Bang. Physicists can probe earlier than this only indirectly, through consequences in the observable Universe.

The current methods can model early Universe only starting a tiny fraction of a second after the "zero moment"

Answer 2

When we look at an object, whether we use a telescope or not, we are able to see it because light from the object, in the form of photons, travels from the object, eventually gets to us where it enters our eye, strikes a detector in the back of our eye called the retina, and produces an image for the brain to see. The photon had to travel a distance. If the object is 10 feet away then the photon had to travel that 10 feet. A photon will travel at a speed of no more than approximately 186,282 miles per second so from 10 feet away it gets to you very very very quickly. So fast, in fact, that it's almost instantaneous. The farther away the object is, the longer it takes the light to get from it to you. If the distances are great enough there will be a perceivable delay. Now, looking off into space, we are not only looking into the past, as we always are, we are looking in a direction AWAY from us. So for much the same reason that you can't see yourself when you look across a room, you can't see the Earth when you look out from it. Now the Earth is always moving. It is not stationary and the solar system isn't stationary and the galaxy isn't stationary. We are zipping through the universe and the Earth is many billions of miles from where it was millions of years ago. So you might wonder, if we were to look back to where the Earth was, could we see it? The answer to that is also no. Light travels faster than the Earth does and the light from the Earth when it was in that location would have already passed us (not to mention be to dim, or drowned out by the light of the sun, for us to see). So, no.

Answer 3

No, we will never see farther than 13.7 billion light years away as this is the age of the known universe. If you could see that far away you would see the big bang. Unfortunately the universe was opaque at that time so the farthest we will ever see if some fraction of time after the big bang.

Answer 4

No matter how large the telescopes, we can't even see all the way back to the "big bang". The reason for this, is, for a while after the occurance, the universe was dark. It took a while to cool down enough to light up.

Answer 5

Actually we do, we can see about 46,5 billion light years in each direction.
So the visible universe is approximately 93 billion light years wide.

And the full universe is estimated about 156 billion light years wide.

Answer 6

That's sort of like asking with strong enough binoculars could you see outside the wall in you living room where there's no window.

Answer 7

That's pretty much it. Before the Big Bang, there was nothing. If you subscribe to the theory of super gravity, then the idea is that other universes colided to create this one. Before they colided, there was nothing there where we were. So, there would be nothing to see.

Answer 8

Bob E gets my thumbs up for providing some very good links, but the qualification needed for his response is in the "can" part of "we can see" 40+ billion light years. Tossed off casually, that implies a bigger telescope will see farther into that very large diameter universe of 90+ billion light years. While it is true that we would expect a better telescope to see more and dimmer, even further, than Hubble, building bigger won't get us to see more of "what's out there today." It only shows us "what was emitted a long time ago" and if you go too far back there was nothing to do the emitting.

Relativity says nothing can move faster than light in space, but it does say, that space itself can expand faster than light. In expanding space carries things with it. These things are part of the universe and could easily be at a radius, as of "now" of 46.5 billion light years. And perhaps even more.

But consistent with this analysis, the universe is only 13.7 billion years old, and all that emitted light from wayyyyyy out there hasn't had time to get to us yet. It is visible in the strictest sense of something that can be seen--if y'all happent to be in the neighborhood. It is there to be seen. But it can only be seen *from here* if we add enough 'time" to the visibility criterion. But the universe of "now, today" at 46.5 billion light years is in theory a thing that could be viewed--if you were already "on that side of the universe." If you are on "this side of the universe" you're going to have to wait for the light to get here: many tens of billions of years. The 13.7 billion year "edge" you end up with nothing--if you were to depart in your mental faster-than-light machine today.

Remember that the baby galaxies we see "at the edge of the universe" are, as of today, much older, mature systems. When aliens in those galaxies look towards us, they see tiny red half-formed galaxies at the "edge of the universe." Say they are looking at us "straight down" from. If we look "down" also, directly away from those aliens, we can see another 13.7 billion light years. But those aliens can only detect us. We are at the edge of their detection limit. Now, if those aliens look "up" (directly away from us) they would see another 13.7 billion light years that we can't see. They would again see, at that limit, very young, little tiny red galaxies. But we can't see those from where we are. Not until a good deal more time has passed, anyhow.

The fundamental "problem of understanding" in your question is the idea that the universe is like a giant basketball with an "edge" and that beyond the edge there must be some kind of "outside." You will get farther if you think of the universe as an infinite collection of bb's that blew up to the size of tennis balls that blew up to the size of basket balls that blew up to the size of weather balloons which will become the size of blimps and so on. The edges are not real "edges" as such. They are observability edges defined by the age of the universe.

It is true that you get back to "nothingness" or a conceptual brick wall if you try to go back in TIME to BEFORE the universe. There are theories but it's hard to imagine how they would be tested. Even our physical laws did not exist "before time itself began." So leaving aside that speculation: the TIME is a more fundamental "brick wall" than the SPACE. There is, right now, more universe out there than we can see, no matter what the telescope.

To cap matters off, I should note that it is in theory possible, due to the "expansion effects", to see "beyond the edge of the universe as measured by age"--but only for a billion light years or so. Not the full diameter.

Answer 9

What will we see ? Some optical aberrations, maybe...