The universe was smaller and more dense in the past. Why we can see the oldest galaxies in the world when we look at the outskirts then?

Question

I just can’t wrap my mind around this. Can we see them anywhere? Why, if the universe was smaller? Or is there like one place in space where the aftermath big bang happened (I know there was no space at the time and big bang kinda went everywhere ofc) and we are pointing our telescopes at it?

Using human logic we should see the youngest galaxies (as their images in the past) far away and just won’t be able to spot the elders.

In: 25

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this one just is unintuitive, there’s no way around that. I’m personally not aware if there is a universal, unambiguous answer to “why would something be almost 14b ly away if the universe was tiny”, that’s a question to an actual astrophysicist.

One possible answer I do know is that the universe could actually be infinitely big, so scaling infinity down by any number is still infinity.

If it’s not infinitely big, then I’m not sure what the correct answer is, although my moderetaly-educated guess is that our perceived 3D space behaves like the surface of a sphere, so it doesn’t really have an “edge” and light can just kind of… Go in circles until it interacts with something. But again, that’s my guess, not a professional answer. If an astrophysicist states otherwise, their answer is the valid one.