Comments on: “Baby Boom” galaxy cranks out cranky booming babies

By: Bas

Bas — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:25:47 +0000

I have seen this article now from a number of other sources. Almost all of them have been making the claim of “Rare ‘Star-Making Machine’ Found in Distant Universe”, or something to that effect. Now, is this just really sloppy journalism, or did I miss out on announcements of neighbouring universes being found?

By: MORBAS

MORBAS — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:20:33 +0000

Shades of 3C321 !
Look closely, do you also see a particle beam eminating from a dog bone structure into the targeted star formation globular.

By: m1omg

m1omg — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:18:27 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)

Yeah its Wikipedia, but still, our universe is not just 15 billion light years wide.
And we actually can recieve light from over 60 billion light years apart as these locations were closer earlier in the history.

By: m1omg

m1omg — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:16:45 +0000

“Well, Hugo, that’s one of the cool things about the Big Bang. The universe is still expanding, so in one sense we are “inside” the Big Bang. There is no “outside” of the Big Bang, when astronomers listen to the edge of the Universe there is nothing beyond – no space, no time, no anything. All of the “light” we see at the edge of the universe is the limit of space, which, along with time was created in the Big Bang.

There was no “before” the Big Bang in our Universe.”

Wrong.The space was exanding trillions of trillions times the lightspeed a few planck times after BB (cosmic inflation), so there is a extreme huge lot of space beyong, and if its flat or hyperbolically curved, it is actually infinite from inside and if its closed (not very probable as dark energy prevents this) it is at least 10 to the 37th power of light years in size, so we see actually just 1/10 to the 26th power of the universe at least and very probably its infinite.

By: rb

rb — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:18:29 +0000

Is a “PeterMax” some sorta astronomical term?

By: Ian

Ian — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:44:38 +0000

If the galaxy we’re talking about is 12 billion light years away then we are actually seeing what it looked like 12 billion years ago, (relatively) shortly after the big bang. So far so good. Can we look back 12 billion years in any direction? If were all expanding away from each other than shouldn’t we only be able to see that many billions of years ago if we look towards site of the big bang? Which would be the center of the universe, or at least the original center.

It doesn't matter which direction we look, because actually the universe has no center. Everything in the universe is expanding away from everything else, not away from a particular point. It's a hard concept to grok, but for more information I would recommend this page.

By: Kilgore Trout

Kilgore Trout — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:01:41 +0000

I’ve got a question too, and I hope I don’t sound silly for forgetting something fundamental.

If the galaxy we’re talking about is 12 billion light years away then we are actually seeing what it looked like 12 billion years ago, (relatively) shortly after the big bang. So far so good. Can we look back 12 billion years in any direction? If were all expanding away from each other than shouldn’t we only be able to see that many billions of years ago if we look towards site of the big bang? Which would be the center of the universe, or at least the original center.

I hope I explained that question correctly, and unfortunately I don’t know when I’ll be back online this weekend, so I’ll say thank you now for the explications because you guys are always great at answering questions. So thanks and have a great weekend!