Question Astronomers routinely observe the most distant objects and the earliest events in the universe. If we had a telescope powerful enough, could we observe the Big Bang and if so, could it be observed whichever way we looked?

Accepted:
October 7, 2005

Comments

[[Now that someone with actual knowledge has answered this question, I'm removing my speculations.]]

The following comment has been kindly sent in by Professor Kannan Jagannathan (Department of Physics, Amherst College):

"The best evidence we have for the isotropy andhomogeneity of space leads cosmologists to hold that the universe hasno center and no periphery. If the universe is infinite now, it was soat the Big Bang, and the bang occurred everywhere (in such a case, thedensity of the universe would have been infinite at BB); if theuniverse is finite (and unbounded) now, it was probably point-like atBB, but it is not to be thought of as embedded in some larger space. That was all there was as far as space was concerned; it was'everywhere' then, and is everywhere now.

In the standard model of cosmology, as well as inmost variants of it, the initial rate of increase of the scaleparameter (crudely, the radius of the universe, or the rate ofexpansion of space) would have been bigger, perhaps much bigger, thanthe speed of light. The combination of these two points would suggestthat if light was emitted at BB, we would still be receiving bits ofthat light from parts of the universe that had sped away too fast, andwe would continue to do so for the foreseeable future, particularly ifany of the inflationary scenarios is taken seriously.

The reason the earliest light is from something like300,000 years after the BB is because that is when the universe hadcooled enough to allow neutral atoms to form, and the universe suddenlybecame transparent to electromagnetic radiation. Prior to thisso-called 'recombination era' (a misnomer since it was the first timethat the 'combination' could have occurred), the universe was opaque toall 'signal carriers' that we can think of or detect easily; if onegoes a little farther back in time than 300,000 years, even theneutrinos would have scattered too much to be available as a faithfulimprint of events before."

Question Astronomers routinely observe the most distant objects and the earliest events in the universe. If we had a telescope powerful enough, could we observe the Big Bang and if so, could it be observed whichever way we looked? Accepted:October 7, 2005

Question Astronomers routinely observe the most distant objects and the earliest events in the universe. If we had a telescope powerful enough, could we observe the Big Bang and if so, could it be observed whichever way we looked?

Accepted:
October 7, 2005