if its tru,farther u look into space the farther in the past u can see,if looked far could we c the big bang?

Question

I was told by a teacher that the farther a scope can see into space, that you are seeing deeper into time, so if we looked back far enough could we see the big bang, or what ever happened?

Answer 1

I don't know, either, where the thumbs-downs are coming from. Some of the answers are fairly good explanations.

But some are rubbish. I don't know why people keep talking about travelling faster than light. Yes, if you look far enough you can see far back in time, and yes, there's no way of seeing further than when the place became transparent, which happened because things "spread out" enough that light could travel distances without hitting something.

Hubble has looked deep into the distance and seen very ancient galaxies that may have formed less than a billion years "After Bang". To see much further back may be difficult because there aren't big structures to see.

Answer 2

Some of these answers are very good. I don't know why somebody is giving them thumbs down.

Here's kind of what everybody's talking about.

If you listen to a jet that's way up high, you may seen the jet far head of where the sound is coming from. That's because sound travels at a specific speed. When the plane is in a specific spot it generates sound waves. By the time those specific sound waves reach your ears, the jet has moved. So you are, in effect hearing the sound generated by the jet at some time in the past.

The universe is VERY large. There is no end to the space it can occupy. A star, or a galaxy, can generate light (kind of like the sound generated by the jet). And, also, kind of like the sound, light travels at a specific speed. Suppose a Galaxy is so far away that it takes the light 1000 years to reach earth. That means that the light we see from the galaxy is as it was 1000 years ago. If we could get half way to the galaxy, we would see light that was generated 500 years earlier.

The farther away a source of light is,the longer it takes the light to get to Earth. So, if we find a galaxy so far away it takes 2000 years for the light to get here, we are looking at that galaxy as it was 2000 years ago.. we are kind of looking twice as far back in time as we were when we observed the galaxy that was only 1000 light years away.

It's not like time travel or anything like that. It's seeing things the light of which has taken longer to get here

The big bang seems to be the popular theory of the creation of the universe. Here's the logic behind the theory...

Since everything is moving "outward"... getting farther and farther away from each other, logically at some time in the past everything must have been closer together... and if one goes back further in time, stuff might have been very close together. If one follows that logic, at one time in the distant past everything must have been squished into a very dense package.

What caused it to start moving outward? Everything seems to be moving away from everything else. This is the motion of things exploding.

Science calls the explosion, the big bang. It must have been very large to blast so much stuff so far. As some have stated, there is also physical evidence, i.e., background radiation that is attributed to the big bang.

Don't know if that helps.

Answer 3

You are looking into the past. If you are looking at an object that is 100 light years away then the light that is entering your telescope, or eye, left he star 100 years ago. The Star may no longer exist and we would not know it for 100 years. And if someone on another planet in a solar system 100,000 light years away (approximate diameter of the Milky Way galaxy) could see the Earth then they would see the Earth as it appeared 100,000 years ago. If the Earth were to explode the light from that destruction would reach that other planet 100,000 years after the cataclysm. When I see an object in my telescope that is 100,000 light years away I realize that the light I am looking at tonight left that star when Dinosaurs roamed the Earth (just a visualization as dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago).

Answer 4

You are exactly right. Noisejam is exactly right. We see the Big Bang every day when we observe the Cosmic Background Radiation, which comes from all directions equally and was emitted when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old.

Before that time, the universe was opaque so we can't see further back than that.

Answer 5

What your teacher meant was regarding to the time it takes for the light from a far away star to travel to the earth. Some stars are so far away that if you look at them the light waves you see tonight left that star 50 or more years ago and it is just now getting to earth. It is possible that the star has burned out or super nova-ed 20 years ago but we dont know it because the light waves that show it to us have not reached us yet.

As far as the big bang? That is only a theory. But I doubt that our optics will ever be THAT technologically advanced.

Answer 6

You could if the BB happened in one single region. New explanations point to the possibility of the Quantum being capable of stretching over the entire cosmos. That would allow for the emergence of matter at different intervals over different regions. If the BB were the real description, evidence of a blasting-like effect could be seen. Instead, we observe space expanding away from itself. IOW, the space between galaxies is expanding, not away from a single point of the universe. This leads to a second leading conclusion that the Quantum 'sprays' matter based on causes below our ability to observe.

Answer 7

What you see in space is the reflection of light that was emitted many years ago. When you look at the stars in the sky you're looking at the past not the present.
If we could see events playing themselves in the past by looking into the universe there would no unsolved mysteries and many of the questions we have in life about life would be answered.

Answer 8

No light existed in the universe until the first stars lit up.
This period was about 100 million years after the point of origin.
Nothing in the past can be seen beyond the time.

Answer 9

this is exactly right - in fact when we observe the cosmic background radiation using a radio telescope, we are looking at radiation from the big bang! Expansion of the universe has stretched the wavelengths out.

the universe only became transparent about 300 000 years after the big bang, so this is really the earliest you can actually see - but it's still a very long time ago...

Answer 10

You could if a Big Bang ever existed.I am not too keen to believe that The Universe was built according to that . Its only a theory theory.theory