The Oldest Light in the Universe

"Greg Neill" wrote in message
m...
"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.

OK, I'll bite on this one: if there was NO space before the BB, what was
there instead ??

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.

That's been termed as "hyper-inflation", since there was nothing to impede
the outward expansion into the existing, infinite VOID of space!!

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.

Once again, you cannot shoot a gun and then run fast enough to where the
bullet finally hits the ground, spin around and take a photograph of the
muzzle flsh.

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.

COBE determined that the background radiation is indeed NOT uniform, but
rather blotchy. Even though that difference is measured in fractions of a
degree K, nonetheless it matches the "clumpiness" of galaxy cluster
distribution throughout the observable universe.