How can we see Background radiation

  • Context: High School 
  • Thread starter Thread starter Addez123
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Radiation
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
2 replies · 2K views
Addez123
Messages
199
Reaction score
21
CMB was created 380k years after big bang. Then photons were released in the creation of hydrogen.
How can we still see them today?

Would they not travel fairly straight forward out of our universe and never return again?
 
Astronomy news on Phys.org
Addez123 said:
How can we still see them today?

Because they were released everywhere in the universe. The CMB radiation we are seeing now was released just far enough away that it is reaching us now. In the future we will see CMB radiation that was released still further away.

Addez123 said:
Would they not travel fairly straight forward out of our universe

There is no "out of our universe". Our best current model is that the universe is spatially infinite. That does mean that a particular bit of CMB radiation, once it passes us, won't ever return to us again. But there will always be more, from places more and more distant when the CMB radiation was released.
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: Comeback City
Addez123 said:
...out of our universe ,,,
What does that mean?, what outside?
Outside what is observable to us at the present moment?