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thenewmans
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Am I needlessly annoyed or is this an incorrect interpretation of the term observable universe? It’s not the first time I’ve seen this from space.com. I can understand using “Light Travel Time” as the distance but the only reason 13.7 billion light years is a limit is because you can’t see earlier than the Big Bang. But we can see things that are moving away faster than light. Take an object with a redshift of Z=7, which we have seen. Such an object is moving away from us a roughly 2C. The light has been traveling for 12 billion years and the object is now 30 billion light-years away. Once we get better telescopes, we will see farther. I know of no stuff that came out of the Big Bang that we won’t be able to see given the right equipment. So is space.com misrepresenting the term observable universe?
Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080923-dark-flows.html"
Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080923-dark-flows.html"
In fact there's a fundamental limit to how much of the universe we could ever observe, no matter how advanced our visual instruments. The universe is thought to have formed about 13.7 billion years ago. So even if light started traveling toward us immediately after the Big Bang, the farthest it could ever get is 13.7 billion light-years in distance. There may be parts of the universe that are farther away (we can't know how big the whole universe is), but we can't see farther than light could travel over the entire age of the universe.
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