The most distant objects are reported to be about 13 billion light years away, and the universe is said to be 14 billion light years away. What stops us seeing further?
In a sense, the furthest visible thing one can see is exactly cT away, where T is the age of the universe. That is the big bang itself, which we see as the microwave background. This is microwave radiation coming almost uniformly from all directions in the sky – it is the bang, red shifted and cooled by the expansion of the universe, which makes its wavelengths longer just as it makes intergalactic distances longer. Those microwaves have taken all of the age of the universe to get here. For localised objects, the oldest ones have to be very hot so that they are still visible with huge red shifts. And galaxies and stars didn’t form for a while, so the oldest visible galaxies are a little younger than the universe. Return to top of page and menu The atom, photoelectric effect, energy levels, quanta, black body radiation,. How does the quantisation of emitted radiation explain the black body radiation curve? Why does it have a peak?What is Wien’s law? THE EXPERIMENT. Black body radiation
Related Questions
- The most distant objects are reported to be about 13 billion light years away, and the universe is said to be 14 billion light years away. What stops us seeing further?
- If the Universe is only 10 billion years old, why isn the most distant object we can see 5 billion light years away?
- If the Universe is only 14 billion years old, how can we see objects that are now 47 billion light years away?
