Bob_Sconce t1_jbb313v wrote
Reply to comment by blueasian0682 in James Webb Telescope captures the same galaxy at three different points in time in a single mind-boggling image by mirzavadoodulbaig
So, here's the question: In the big-bang, everything ejected from this one point and spread throughout the cosmos. We are, at this moment, some distance from where that occurred at a location I'll call "X." This photo claims to show light emitted not long after the big bang. It's not possible to travel faster than light.
Q:. How did we get to X faster than the light?
bimundial t1_jbbqoiz wrote
There is no X. Things didn't get ejected, everything was extremely close to everything else, and of a sudden they started to get far away from everything else. It's like the surface of a baloon, if you inflate it, everything is further apart, there is no "point of ejection" on the surface.
Bob_Sconce t1_jbbs5br wrote
That doesn't really help -- if everything was extremely close to everything else, then just pick 'X' to be the geographic center of all of that -- the exact center of the uninflated balloon if you like. At the beginning, we may not have been precisely at X, but we were very very close to it.
(Also, I intended X to be where we are now, not where the mass that is currently the earth was at the point of the big bang. But, that was not at all clear, so I'm just going with 'X= point of the big bang.')
bimundial t1_jbbwvbm wrote
A ballon's surface doesn't have a center. If you inflate it, its area will grow at the same rate everywhere. You can put a point in any place of a sphere's surface and none of them will be the center, that's how it goes with the universe too, as far as I know.
So the big bang is basically that, it was a smaller area, maybe infinitesimaly smaller area, that just got bigger everywhere. Everything was just farther apart. There was no center before, there isn't one now, just like a inflated sphere surface.
Bob_Sconce t1_jbcds33 wrote
? The surface doesn't have a center, but the balloon does. If all the mass was on the balloon surface, then there is a point inside the balloon that is, effectively, the center of mass of all that mass. That's X. And, presumably, not ALL of the mass expanded outward, otherwise there would be a massive empty space in the middle of the universe. (As far as I know, that hasn't been discovered.)
bimundial t1_jbchal1 wrote
But the universe IS the surface. In this example, there is no inside. For an object placed upon the baloon, all that he sees is everything getting further apart, and that's how the universe behaves.
The universe was smaller, than it got bigger. It got bigger everywhere, in all directions, at the same rate. There is no 'X' direction where things got pushed out of, everything just got more distant from everything else.
Bob_Sconce t1_jbd1wp7 wrote
So, things got more distant from each other at a rate that was faster than the speed of light?
twistier t1_jbd3w5k wrote
The expansion of space does not have the speed limit that traveling through space has.
bimundial t1_jbdvkmc wrote
Yep. That's because the things weren't getting distant inside space-time, but space-time itself was expanding between things. Relativity only puts a cap on the speed things move inside time-space, not the rate that time-space itself grows
gyrofx t1_jbbev9q wrote
The way I understand it, there is no X, or put another way everything in the universe is point X.
Also, I'm dumb and maths is hard..
Bensemus t1_jbfif90 wrote
> everything ejected from this one point and spread throughout the cosmos.
No. There is no centre everything exploded from. Infinite now, infinite then.
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