“So the Hubble Space Telescope takes photos of photons and a photon travels at the speed of light which is approximately 186,282 miles per second or approximately 97,909,819,200 miles per year. This being said, these photons could only be traveling for 13.8 billion light years.
My question is, especially with the expansion of space time which seems to moves everything farther apart from everything else (I would assume that this includes photons), if the universe was brought into existence 13.8 billion years ago and that distance has been increased by 3.4 times, to equal the radius of 47 billion light years. Wouldn’t that mean that the furthest we could see anything at this point would be 4.05 billion light years away (13.8 billion divided be 3.4).
And secondly, if this adjustment for the space time factor is not a factor at all for some reason. How is it that the Hubble Space Telescope can see galaxies that are 47 billion light years away when the photons from these galaxies have only traveled a maximum of 13.8 billion light years? It would seem as though they would be coming up about 33.2 billion light years short.”

You’re doing the math backward. Imagine you run at light speed from one end of a wide slinky to the other, which starts out compressed. As you run, the slinky is being stretched out, so that, by the time you reach the other end, the slinky is now 47 billion light-years long. (We’ll presume that no matter how stretched out the slinky gets, you won’t fall between the coils. Also, your speed is relative to the part of the slinky you’re running on.)

But as it turns out, you ran for only 13.8 billion years, because parts of the slinky that are now a light-year long were always less than that when you were running on them. And since every part of the slinky was somewhat stretched by the time you got to it, the starting length of the slinky must have been less than 13.8 billion light-years.

So in a sense, the 13.8-billion-year age of the photons is an average between the short distance the photons started with and the long distance that exists now.

If we were to go off on a tangent, doesn’t that seem “possible” that what we are seeing are the effects of other dimensions and it’s galaxies on our own? Where is all the anti-matter we think should have destroyed “our” matter in our universe, maybe that’s what makes up dimension (2) Yin / Yang?

Unlike the Mayan calendar, which happens to “run-out” soon, I can conceive of much larger figures than the extended maths which gives us these measurements. I don’t figure it as “wishful thinking”, just an extension of good old Euclidean geometry.

@42 John Hannan ……..” 47 … 94 … 148 …”

These figures are mentioned, among others, and I have a pet beef regarding the quoting of circumference as if it matters, when we are dealing essentially with straight line distances from objects that are so very far away. If one was going to put up a boundary fence – yeah, it might be pertinent!

Along the same line I hiss at the usual “mind-blowing distance”, the ISS has travelled since launch, or the latest SpaceShuttle or Probe for that matter, breaking records and toting up the miles. I know it is promulgated by the Popular Press, but why can’t the NASA agencies, TV News and writers of Reports, understand the public can comprehend these distances without going to the largest possible figure which is meaningless in the context of a short report?

PS. I exclude that “largest possible figure” remark from the question of using “miles/kilometers”, as world practice dictates, where most of us use Metric measurements, and I am grateful Phil does too now, mostly, and first, where he does give the alternative.

(Ha ha, metric is more!!!!) Insert emoticon here! (I’ve run out of yellow ink).

Ivan.

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Keep in mind that the radius of 47 billion light years is merely that of our observeable universe, not the entire universe. Cool, huh?

If they’re in every photo, how can you tell it’s an artifact and not a common feature of the universe?

And if it’s just a problem with the lenses, then you’d think the scientists would have noticed and corrected for it by now.

Face it, you’re a good person, helpful and with good intentions. However, feeding the troll distracts the thread and often results in a foundation for thread hijacking. You know this ’cause you’re a Bad Astronomy ‘old fart’, like me.

The Poe be damned, they’re worse than the pun.

Cheers and good night.

Just because somebody else is rude doesn’t mean we have to be!

I’m not sure whether Cole A is a troll or a Poe. Personally, I don’t think it hurts to calmly respond with facts & logic instead of leaving nonsense comments unanswered. I’m not getting upset or flaming anybody just putting in my view on what was said. Oh & I responded because I wanted to. I’m not saying others have to. Maybe you’re right & it is a bad idea. But maybe it’ll make the troll or some by-standers think anew and maybe its a good tool for keeping the mind somewhat sharp? Heck some of us [Mea culpa] just like discussing and even (politely) arguing things.

Yes, I agree that MOND as a general theory is bogus. As it’s only a phenomonological hack, that’s hardly unexpected. What is unexpected (and deeply troubling given the current state of DM) is that it manages to do so many things so well with basically one parameter. The phenomena that it predicts on the galactic scale are just too darn impressive. IMO, DM people desperately need to explain how all the complicated possible galactic behaviors that would seem to be allowed by DM don’t happen, and instead how all the DM arranges itself so that MOND appears to be correct at the galactic scale.

In other words, while MOND is bogus, the behavior it predicts on the galactic scale is real. DM must be able to give those same predictions, otherwise it’s also bogus. The DM people don’t seem to appreciate this nearly enough.

It almost looks like the galaxies there are moving – spiralling inwards towards the centre like a whilpool in a lake.

@27. Cole A : “This is such a farce, the universe is only six thousand years old.”

If you were doing a Poe there you need to try harder and add a emoticon at the end for clarity. If not, oh for pity’s sake, that’s just sad. Creationism has been debunked so many times in so many ways and is completely unsatisfactory as an explanation for the grand comos we observe all around in, well, images like this, the Hubble (Ultra-)Deep Fields and so many more.

Six thousand years? We have ice cores and ancient cities older than that just here on Earth to say nothing of radiocarbon dating and so forth.

So, please, Cole A, tell us whether you were joking or serious there and, if you were serious, what you think explains this “farcical” image if not modern science and what evidence you think suggests this glactic cluster is 6,000 years old or younger?

Or as (#33.) Dr Flimmer put it above :

In short, before you question a (VERY) well tested theory, you must find evidence first that it might be incorrect! (And no, the one neutrino of recent doesn’t count. That claim is so extraordinary that it requires extraordinary evidence, i.e. more! Until then, one should stay quite skeptical about it.) Or in other words: What’s your theory that describes all these effects, and does so better than GR?

Or in your case, Cole A, what alternative theory do you offer explains MACS J1206 better than our modern cosmological understanding of the Big Bang and galaxy cluster formation and what evidence do you offer to support your ideas?

Failure to answer that challenge reasonably would be, well, farcical really!

@22. L.Walker : “I dub you, Sir Squiggles of Bacon!”

Yes!

I second that name for that “wiggly galaxy off to the right of the cluster center” shown in the second photo here – it does, indeed, look just like rasher of bacon!

Well, four years ago I thought MOND was a good idea, too. However, MOND has one severe problem. Although you can explain many phenomena with it, different phenomena require different parameters within MOND making it inconsistent.
And the worst thing for MOND is the Bullet Cluster, where the center of mass is clearly separated from the shine atomic stuff we are made of. This cannot explained by MOND, but by Dark Matter.

@ #32 lisarenee3505

Stating that Occam’s razor implies that our understanding of physics is deeply flawed, as you suggest, may seem an easy solution to avoid any meaningful discussions, however, it is not how science works. Sure, we should question our results from time to time, but not if they have been tested and tested and tested over and over again, and passed every single one with great success.
If you think that General Relativity (GR) might “just be a theory”, you should check the evidence. GR works really fine. It is the best theory physics has ever achieved, along with Quantum Mechanics, of course. Your GPS wouldn’t work without it. The gravitational lens effect (which is the underlying effect mentioned in the article by Phil above) has been proven not only during solar eclipses, but also the predictions of the so-called Einstein rings turned out to be correct. Gravitational redshift (not to confuse with cosmological redshift, these are different things!) has been observed in several experiments. As a matter of fact, our atomic clocks become so precise that we have to take into account where we place them, because time runs differently on different heights above sea level. And there are many more.

In short, before you question a (VERY) well tested theory, you must find evidence first that it might be incorrect! (And no, the one neutrino of recent doesn’t count. That claim is so extraordinary that it requires extraordinary evidence, i.e. more! Until then, one should stay quite skeptical about it.)

Or in other words: What’s your theory that describes all these effects, and does so better than GR?

Mind over dark matter! I see what it is doing, but then We already knew.

The “red dudes” are in all of them but maybe less so than in this particular image which is outstanding on many fronts.

The “space eel” is not immediately observed but with imagination you can understand the principle. If in the other images you would increase the compacting of the image towards the central section of the lens, you can see that some of the distorted galaxies would start to look like space eels as well. I think therefore that this eel is not the result of those 2 galaxies at either side of it alone but an accumulation of both that, and the lens effect. Just because this lens is so strong it compacts everything in a thin line and the orginal shape is lost to our eyes.

The orientation perpendicular to the radiant of the lens is also present in all the other ones. I think that they all started out as round or near round galaxies which are orientated in random. The lens just pulls the light inward and squashes them in a circular fashion around itself.

You might see the pictures yourself if you go to hubble site or the archives and find the following ones ( I hope the names are still the same as some are from hubbles early years)

hs-2003-01-a
hs-2006-23-a

most were there in small and full format but I am not sure what they have left there today.

I am sure that you guys can find even more pictures with the same effects, I just scanned my folders and found these 2 best ones to talk about.

With regards to trolls…….I thought we didn’t talk to them here, so why the responses to the religious flavoured comments?

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??? I admit I’m scratching my head as to how you came to this conclusion. If you’re referring to my @20 comment, I was referring to the name, not dark matter itself.

Cheers

OK, but I want someone to figure out why the DM generally seems to arrange itself so that MOND’s non-DM predictions work. When that happens, I think most of the skeptics will become believers. I know that if I was a DM cosmologist, I’d be losing sleep constantly over how the “baryonic tail” can be wagging the “DM dog”.

If it is, then God created it in such a way that it looks much older.

Are you happy to worship such a deceptive God?

To put it another way, the reason astronomers talk of a universe that’s 13.7 billion years old is because they’ve gone where the evidence has led them. Remember there are plenty of Christian astronomers who have no problem with a universe that old.

- We know it has mass and that it doesn’t interact much or at all with EM, which is why it is called “dark matter”, and all sorts of ordinary matter (inclusively black holes) have been invalidated as making the same predictions at some time or other.

This is standard procedure. “Atoms” were “a placeholder” for ~ 2000 years (from natural philosophy), a predictive hypothesis for ~ 200 years (from chemistry), an accepted hypothesis for ~ 100 years (from Einstein predicting brownian motion), and earliest visualized as highs and lows in AFM images or as blinking ions in traps for ~ 10 years or so.

We know more of DM/DE than chemists knew of atoms at the time they first realized it should be a feature of nature. So why do you expect to laugh at DM (or DE) when you don’t laugh at atoms any longer?

I would say that if someone is skeptical at this stage, it isn’t based in an understanding of science and how it makes progress. All alternative theories have now fallen (we can model galaxies with DM!), and that means it is highly unlikely to be anything else than a done deal.

When I worked on Hubble, I was on some projects that got two orbits, and we were happy to get them!

Is this our cue to start an astronomers’ version of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch?

Two Hubble orbits? Bah! When I started doing astronomy, we had to wait until the end of the Milton Berle show before people would let us borrow their radios to build a VLA. And we liked it!

Of course, my grandma could tell you a thing or two. You kids have it so easy, with your transparent universe and everything.

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.