Bandersnatch
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The 'better technology' is meant as 'perfect technology'. You can't see farther than the bits specified in principle. Since the farther you look, the earlier universe you see, looking at the edge of the 'extra bit' means that you're looking at the beginning of time, when everything would have to be on top of everything else (aka 'the cosmological singularity').Nick Levinson said:My model B assumed technology would be perfect, whereas the chart speaks only of better technology.
This has to do with the accelerated expansion of the universe. Accelerated expansion results in the appearance of a cosmic event horizon, from beyond which no signal can ever reach the observer. I don't want to get into details here, so let's just say, provisionally and somewhat incorrectly, that it's because as light advances 1ly per year, the space expands sufficiently to carry it back at least that much. The closer the emitter is to the event horizon, the longer it takes the light it emits to reach the observer, with this time approaching infinity in the limit of the horizon.Nick Levinson said:I'm unclear why one would have to wait much longer than 63 gly to see 63 gly out unless the observer is not allowed to travel.
The distances indicated on the graph are 'proper distances at t=now'. This means that these are distances you'd measure today, if you could stop the expansion and go out there with a really long ruler to measure how far that is. These are the distances to the emitters of the light that you receive today.
This means a few things:
1. when the light you see now was emitted, the farthest emitters were closer (about a thousand times closer) than the 45 Gly indicated on the graph. Their light had to travel through the expanding space, which takes longer than through non-expanding space.
2. by the time their light reached us, the emitters have been carried away by the expansion to the 45 Gly mark. This is the sense in which we can see that part of the universe.
3. the 63 Gly mark is where TODAY are the emitters of the light which, due to the expanding space, will only reach us in the infinite future. That is, this is the light that was emitted in the past at the edge of the event horizon and is still on its way.
4. by the time the light from objects currently at 63 Gly reaches us - in the infinite future - those objects will have receded to infinity.
One can't move somewhere else, or send a probe to make photos, in order to see beyond the event horizon, since that would entail traveling faster than light. If, on the other hand, one wants to send a probe to somewhere within one's event horizon, that probe won't be able to see further than what one would get just by waiting.
Hmm, I feel I haven't made it clear enough. Cosmological horizons might warrant a separate discussion, though.
I made it using outputs from this calculator:Nick Levinson said:It'd be interesting to know the chart's provenance.
http://www.einsteins-theory-of-relativity-4engineers.com/LightCone7-2017-02-08/LightCone_Ho7.html
And by eyeballing the lightcone graphs in this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310808.pdf
The 63 Gly is probably the least accurate, since I only had the graph to go by. Give it +/- 2 Gly error bars.
These represent the Lambda-CDM concordance model of cosmology, with latest data from PLANCK satellite (in case of the calculator; the paper is a bit older).
No, Drakkith. It takes infinite time to receive light emitted IN THE PAST by emitters TODAY at the 63 Gly mark. See the discussion above, or go to the Davis&Lineweaver paper linked and look at the conformal time vs comoving distance graph.Drakkith said:The observer wouldn't have to wait longer than 63 billion years to see that far out because they can already see out to 45 billion light years. They'd only have to wait around 20 billion years for that light to come into view.
No, even a non-spherical universe needs no centre. It could be toroidal, or be an infinite plane (in the 2D analogy). But a finite universe with a physical edge and a geometric centre is not entertained, since there's no physical basis for such space, whereas general relativity can accommodate infinite spaces. To put it in other words, since it looks like gravity works like we think it does, and we see expansion happening, edges are not permitted.Nick Levinson said:That universe would likely be larger than what physics let's us perceive, thus likely more than 93 gly across (I'd have to add to my four-type typology of universes hereinabove), and this universe (larger than what physics allows observing from one point) is not certain to be spherical. That kind of universe would necessarily have a geometric center and thus Earth would have an address relative to that center and therefore a speed related to the Hubble effect (a rate of speed change implies a speed that could be changed).
When there is no edge, and no centre, then it doesn't make sense to ask about recessional speed of Earth - it's stationary w/r to the Hubble flow (barring local, peculiar motions like orbits etc.).