If I have a super large telescope, would I be looking towards the beginning of the universe no matter which direction I point it?

641 views

I read that the Hubble telescope could look 13.2 billion years back in time – what would it see if it turned 180 degrees and looked the other way?

In: Other

21 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

No – the end of the universe is based on pure speculation. Its much more likely that the universe is infinite large and has no end.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes! u/brokennoggin has the general idea of the cosmological principle but the example I usually like to give is the expanding balloon analogy. the big bang expanded the universe drastically over time from a small point to essentially and inflated balloon. If you were living on the surface of the balloon, where is the “center”? You could argue that you are the center, you could argue that there is no center, they are both correct. What a telescope does is that it looks “back in time” like you said. Back when the “balloon” wasn’t as large. The bigger the telescope, the further back you can look and the “smaller” the balloon you’re living on appears! After a certain point, the “universe” at a certain point looks so small that no matter which way you’re looking it’s staring at the same object!

It also means there’s a theoretical limit, you cant see “through” the balloon no matter how far back you look, it just gets to the point where it’ll look like that regardless. This would be what the Cosmic Microwave background would be analogous to.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Everything you look at is in the past. Everything. The farther away the thing is, the farther back into its past you are seeing. On a global scale, this time differential is minimal, getting larger the farther out you go. The sun you see is from 8 minutes ago. The closest star we can see we are seeing what it was 4 years ago. No matter where you look, you are looking into the past and many of the stars you see are dead and have been for millennia.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Is the expansion of the universe measurable? Is Jupiter or Alpha Centauri going farther and farther away?

Anonymous 0 Comments

I like to imagine the universe as a balloon. When you blow up the balloon every point on the surface moves apart from each other and there is no uniform center.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Think of yourself on a boat in the middle of ocean. Where is the horizon? That’s how you should think about the edge of the universe where the curvature of the Earth is substituted for the finiteness of the speed of light.

The horizon is equal distance from your “center” such is the universe.

Anonymous 0 Comments

An easy analogy is if you were on a boat out at see. You can only see so far out due to the curvature of the Earth. Someone else out in the ocean would have a different horizon since they would only be able to see the same distance around them.

This is also what you can think of for using a telescope. Earth is a boat out in the universes ocean. Every direction you look you can see the same distance away. This isn’t due to curvature like the ocean boat example. Instead it’s due to the speed of light which is a constant. We see the same distance in every direction because it took the light that long to reach us.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Two interesting books about visualizing multi-dimensional physical perspectives are the 1884 tale by schoolmaster Edwin Abbott called “Flatland” (actually a commentary on Victorian social hierarchy) and the 1965 English translation of the 1957 novel by Dionys Burge called “Sphereland”.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes, but actually no. The notion that you can somehow step out of spacetime and look at it from an external perspective is incorrect.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, wherever your looking, what you see is from the past no matter what. So yeah, kinda wherever that telescope is pointing is showing you images/data from the past.