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If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

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Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#71

how can universe be expanding faster than speed of light? general relativity doesn't apply here?

Idk, but if we travel 13B light years one way, it moves 13B the other then were at 26, and space itself has to have expanded 20 billion light years within the time it takes light to travel 13... So yeah, sounds like something is moving faster than light.

Things can't move faster than light, that isn't possible, but we can think about abstract concepts that aren't things. Fairness for example. Infinity. These are not things. Expanding space isn't a thing, it's just a concept. So that can go however fast you want.

Let's try something much smaller and easier to reason about. Take a small fairly directional lamp (in my country we'd say a "torch" but words vary) and hold up a coin in front of it so that it makes a big obvious shadow on a far away wall, you may need to turn down ambient lighting. Relatively small movements of the coin result in the shadow moving quickly. Huh. How fast can that shadow move?

While the coin is a _thing_ the shadow is not, it's just your imagination processing the absence of light.

If you have a big enough room and a strong enough light source, you can do this trick so that a flick of the wrist appears to move the shadow much faster than the speed of sound. If a _thing_ did that in a room filled with breathable air you'd hear a sonic boom. But the shadow isn't a thing, it exists only in your imagination and so you hear nothing.

Large enough objects can occlude a star to have this effect on a cosmic scale. The shadow of a planet can pass over the face of another planet at faster than the speed of light. But no actual _thing_ moved, so no rules are broken by this happening, "faster than the speed of light" was only in your head, all the actual things (including the photons) obeyed the rules and stayed at or below the speed limit.

Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#72
post #25

And... another author that doesn't get it or looks for a controversial, clickbaity title. The correct way to state it would be to say: "We are seing things that are currently 46B light years away but since they are so far away we see them as they were 13.8B years ago when they were much closer than they are now." I see absolutely nothing difficult about that statement unless you really need to create some piece of co…

Yet you can't account for them now being 46B light years away without breaching C, or encompassing the expansion of the universe, within which things are moving. I think he manages a clear explanation of that without scaring away too many. Your "correct" version on the other hand, leaves more questions than answers, not least of which being how do we ever get 46B ly distance in something 13.8B years old. Then you hav…

Right - It is not clear how we can see something more than 13.8B ly away since it would take more than 13.8B years for signals of its existence to reach us. From our frame of reference, that would mean the emission started before the big bang.

Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#73
post #20

If what we’re seeing was 13.8B light years away 13.8B years ago and are now 46B light years away, wouldn’t that mean that those things traveled ~32.2B light years in 13.8B years. Wouldn’t that thus mean they travelled faster than the speed of light? Maybe I’m misunderstanding though. EDIT: I guess you also have to take into account the expansion of the fabric of space as well and not just the movement of the galaxies…

In essence, it's 'okay' for things to be FTL due to expansion of the medium. Imagine an ant crawling across a balloon as we stretch it. The ant could get some pretty fantastic apparent speeds relative to another ant because the medium is expanding, but step by step its moving at regular ant speed.

It is interesting to think of the opposite: space fabric is shrinking, so light needs to travel "slower" so as not to break causality. I know I know, it's not really slower because the fabric is shrinking.

Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#74
post #32

If you are turning in bed and can't sleep I'll give you some questions to think about. Even though some are non-sensical in a way, they are a good starting point to ponder about: - Is space really flat (infinite) or curved (finite)? - If it is flat and the universe had the beginning (big bang) then does it just have "potential infinity", by ever-expanding? - If it is curved is it implied that it is encompassed by som…

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Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#75

how can universe be expanding faster than speed of light? general relativity doesn't apply here?

Space is expanding everywhere and not just around the edges.

Space inside the edges has photons flying in it, while this photon travels, space is expanding in all of the photons directions.

This would mean that a photon from 5 billion years ago would take longer to get here, and its source is even further away than the speed between us and the source would make it be.

What I think about during all this: If space is expanding everywhere, then it is sort of pushing things away from each other, meaning that objects are moved, like domino's everything is moved a bit so that everything has more space in between.

Do I have to separate expansion of the universe vs expansion of space?

Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#76
post #20

If what we’re seeing was 13.8B light years away 13.8B years ago and are now 46B light years away, wouldn’t that mean that those things traveled ~32.2B light years in 13.8B years. Wouldn’t that thus mean they travelled faster than the speed of light? Maybe I’m misunderstanding though. EDIT: I guess you also have to take into account the expansion of the fabric of space as well and not just the movement of the galaxies…

Some of the confusion is, I think from referring to speed of light as "speed of light". When it really is speed limit of causality between 2 points in space. And light (em waves) just happen to be able to hit that limit. Now since expansion of space is itself not going to allow one point in space to cause any effect on another, it (the expansion) can be faster than speed of causality. PBS space time has a good video…

It is also peculiar that the energy conservation law is not applicable on cosmological scales, the light is redshifted due to expansion of the Universe and the energy difference between emitted and received light is "wasted", i.e. it doesn't feed the expansion in any way.

Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#77
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the confusion is, I think from referring to speed of light as "speed of light". When it really is speed limit of causality between 2 points in space. And light (em waves) just happen to be able to hit that limit. Now since expansion of space is itself not going to allow one point in space to cause any effect on another, it (the expansion) can be faster than speed of causality. PBS space time has a good video…

It is also peculiar that the energy conservation law is not applicable on cosmological scales, the light is redshifted due to expansion of the Universe and the energy difference between emitted and received light is "wasted", i.e. it doesn't feed the expansion in any way.

I don't know if 'feeding expansion' is necessarily the right way to think about this, but by the first Friedmann equation, loss of photon energy will in fact be balanced by the increased expansion rate...

Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In essence, it's 'okay' for things to be FTL due to expansion of the medium. Imagine an ant crawling across a balloon as we stretch it. The ant could get some pretty fantastic apparent speeds relative to another ant because the medium is expanding, but step by step its moving at regular ant speed.

It is interesting to think of the opposite: space fabric is shrinking, so light needs to travel "slower" so as not to break causality. I know I know, it's not really slower because the fabric is shrinking.

But there is non space "fabric". There are interactions between qanta/matter but space is still space right?

Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#79
post #77
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also peculiar that the energy conservation law is not applicable on cosmological scales, the light is redshifted due to expansion of the Universe and the energy difference between emitted and received light is "wasted", i.e. it doesn't feed the expansion in any way.

I don't know if 'feeding expansion' is necessarily the right way to think about this, but by the first Friedmann equation, loss of photon energy will in fact be balanced by the increased expansion rate...

Sure, though the first Friedmann equation, or any other equation, where terms are balanced, e.g. a + b = 0, doesn't tell you anything about causality, though redshifting of light is exactly caused by expansion, so it is not strange that both are "balanced".

Re: If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)

#80
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would some things be bound by the speed of light and not others? I always thought of this limitation as an all-or-nothing law.

Everything that moves through space is bound by the speed of light. But space itself is expanding at a rate such that two distant points can move away from each other faster than the speed of light. Think of it like two ants on opposite sides of a balloon, one ant starts moving toward the other as fast as it can go, but then you start to inflate the balloon. The distance between the two ants expands faster than an an…

Thanks for this clarification.
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