"Hagar" wrote in message
...

I am still confused about seeing these images from the past. Take the BB,
for instance. It's image has been traveling radially at the speed of
light
ever since it happened. Shortly after the BB, physical matter started to
slow down and began to clump together, thus further slowing down. Along
the
way, about 8 billion years later, Earth formed. By my estimation, the
image
of the BB has traveled way beyond the Earth, the edge of the visible
Universe, even and is lost forever, at least as a pictorial visual. It is
almost as if someone shoots a pistol, then taking off running in the same
direction and claiming to catch the bullet just before it hits the ground.

Your model of the Big Bang is flawed; you're picturing
everything rushing out of an explosion into pre-existing
space. The BB was an explosion (expansion) of space
itself, occurred everywhere (everywhere that existed) at
once, and there was no center.

The expansion was so fast that light from events that
happened even relatively close to one another could
not reach each other since the space between expanded
at many times the speed of light itself. We're seeing
light that left those (then) "nearby" events just
arriving now. So when we look out into space in *any*
direction, we're looking back in time towards the Big
Bang.


As far as the background emissions, I think that the Universe wants to be
at
the absolute Zero, but the combined radiation of the billions of galaxies
is
enough to keep the ambient galactic temperature at about 3.5 or so degrees
above zero. As they are receding from each other, that is very slowly
dropping towards zero, and by the time the last stars blip out into
oblivion, everything will stop.

Nope. The cosmic background radiation is much more uniform
than the clumpy matter concentrations of galaxies, and
matches the curve of black body radiation very precisely.