Probably Dumb Questions

I hope you esteemed scientists will not mind a lay person like me
asking some basic questions. I'm no scientist, and don't normally
read this newsgroup, but I can't find the answers anywhere else.

My questions are stimulated by recent news of HUDF detecting a galaxy
13 million plus light years away and the oldest object detected.

Do we know the direction of the center of the universe, the point
where the big bang happened, the point from which everything is
supposedly racing away in all directions?

[[Mod. note -- The big didn't happen "at a point", but rather
"everywhere at once". See the following web pages for explanations:

Ned Wright's Cosmology tutorial
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm
and Cosmology FAQ
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html

The Physics FAQ, see in particular the question
"Where is the centre of the universe?" in the "General Relativity
and Cosmology" section
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/index.html

The Astronomy FAQ
http://sciastro.astronomy.net/
has a good section on "Cosmology"
-- jt]]

Is the red shift of this 13-million-year-distant furthest galaxy
corrected for our velocity relative to the center of the universe?
That is, if we are on one side of the center of the universe, and this
farthest galaxy is on the opposite side (or any other place for that
matter), wouldn't that galaxies apparent motion be the vector sum of
our true velocity relative to the stationary center of the universe,
and it's true velocity relative to a stationary center? If that is
true, then is it also true that the most likely rewarding direction to
look for the oldest detectable object be further outward along the
line of our movement away from the big bang center, since an object on
this line, of fixed brightness, would have the highest apparent
brightness, since it would be closer to us than any other object at
the edge of the universe? Is that where HUDF is looking, or am I
making a mess of the logic by my obvious ignorance of some basics of
cosmology/astronomy?

If this isn't the best news group forum for asking these questions,
can you suggest which news group is best?

John Pierce

[[Mod. note -- There is also the unmoderated sci.astro group,
although it's signal-to-noise ratio may be low. -- jt]]