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?
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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.
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