Alan McDougal said:
For the others perhaps you should consider the fact that so called highly intelligent people are not good at thinking. None of you gave an answer to my question in this thread. or instance by saying back ground cosmic microwave radiation is not somewhere but everywhere. For goodness sake, how can something that exists in the background also be everywhere?
Anywhere that you go in the Universe you will see CMB photons coming at you from all directions. I'd say that's a pretty good definition of something being 'everywhere'. In addition, every point in the Universe 13 Billion years ago gave of the light that forms the CMB. Somewhere out there are aliens that are currently seeing the CMB photons that were emitted by the hydrogen atoms that now make up the water in our oceans. The same is true for every region of the Universe. The CMB was produced by every part of the Universe and can currently be observed in every part of the Universe to be coming from every direction. Again I'd say that's a pretty good definition of something being 'everywhere'.
I'm not sure what you mean by the CMB being 'in the background'? Maybe if you explain a little more what you mean by that we can clear up this confusion.
Alan McDougal said:
Using a static universe to solve the argument gets us absolutely nowhere, all it does it tell us the Earth and quasar are separated. Not by how far (no red shift)
The point is that it doesn't matter how far we are separated from anyone particular quasar. Yes, if we properly consider an expanding universe we find that quasars are most commonly found between a redshift of 1 and 2. If we existed further in the future, we would still see quasars, but now we would see them at a different redshift, say between 4 and 5. They wouldn't be the exact same quasars we see now, since there light will have already passed us. They will be different quasars, ones that were further away from us when they were 'on' such that their light took longer to reach us.
Alan McDougal said:
For instance if we receive light from a remote sources such as quasar 12 billion years light years from Earth in our expanding universe, this object would have to moved out to a distance of 24 light years by now which is more than the proposed age of the universe. Therefore, does it still exist?
I'm not sure where you are getting those exact numbers from, but yes the quasar still exists. In an expanding universe the distance in light years to a distant object today is not the same number as the amount of time the light has been traveling, but I can't fathom how that makes something stop existing?
Remember also that saying something is '20 Billion lights years away' is actually a very loose terminology. Cosmologists don't measure distance like this precisely because it is bad practice. What that distance means is this:
'If you hit pause on the Universe such that time and motion frooze and measured the distance to that distant object with a ruler that is how far away the object is'
Clearly this is an impossible distance to measure, but we can calculate what it would be if it was somehow possible. Remember that we are seeing the light from the object, not actually seeing the object today.
Better measures of distance are redshift, angular diameter distance, luminosity distance etc. Don't get too hung up on distances stated in billions of light years since this is an inherently unphysical definition of distance.
Again I re-iterate that all of this just clouds the understanding of your original question, which was why can we see quasars given that they only exist for a short time. I will say again that the expansion of the Universe only needs to be considered if we want to know whether we can see
one particular quasar at some particular distance. For a particular quasar there will be one single period of time that we see it. However, due to the fact that the Universe is very large (and possibly infinite) we know that regardless of the specifics of the expansion, or indeed whether the Universe is expanding at all, that
we will always be able to see quasars regardless of the current age of the Universe or any other number. This is purely a result of the Universe being Homogeneous, large and light traveling at a finite speed.
Alan McDougal said:
The assumption that one is ignorant and a patronizing attitude is not helpful, I am an amateur astronomer and know what I am talking about.
Alan
No one is assuming anything (as far as I can tell) and no one has patronised you, again as far as I can tell. I've been trying to help to understand this, since you asked the question. If you knew all about this already you wouldn't have needed to ask the question in the first place. If you don't want help I can stop giving it, but then I wonder why you bothered asking the question in the first place?