OT: Major Space Discovery
The Board discussed this last week (HERE).
Researchers believe they discovered the signal in space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
The New York Times has an in-depth piece about the theory and the BICEP2 team on the South Pole "seeing" the radio waves dating 13.8 billion years ago.
Dr. Alan Guth is credited with the theory of "inflation," which explains why the universe expanded so quickly and uniformly. The idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second would seem to be confirmed by this discovery.
But it depends on what you mean by "age."
/timeywimey
As far as we can tell the visible universe is around 14 billion years old. We know that because that's as far as we can see. Since it appears the theory of inflation has been proved and the universe expanded at faster than the speed of light just after the big bang, wouldn't that make the universe younger?
March 17th, 2014 at 10:14 PM ^
March 18th, 2014 at 11:37 AM ^
I'm not an expert, but I don't think the speed of light limit has anything to do with whether objects have mass. Photons of light obviously travel at the speed of light and can't move faster. As I understand it, space itself, however, isn't moving through space (it IS space), so would not be limited by the speed of light. In other words, you can't travel down the road at faster than 35 mph, but there's no such limit on stretching the road itself.
There's also a theoretical particle called a tacheon that would travel faster than light. It would require additional energy to slow down, and could never slow below the speed of light. Sort of the inverse of our normal particles. There's no direct evidence of its existence, however, so not much relevance to it at this point.
March 17th, 2014 at 10:05 PM ^
No. Scientists had previously taken into account that the universe had expanded faster than the speed of light during inflation. That's why the observable universe centered around Earth is considered to be 46 billion light years in radius. This discovery doesn't change that.
March 17th, 2014 at 11:40 PM ^
"There's 70 billion people of Earth. Where are they hiding?"
--Cabaret Voltaire
March 17th, 2014 at 10:25 PM ^
March 18th, 2014 at 12:44 AM ^
was really a big bang. We knew from radio waves the big bang occurred but we never knew how rapid the universe grew in a fraction of a second. This was pure energy, if I remember correctly it took a bit of time before protons and atoms formed and matter won out over anti matter. Overall exciting news. Other theories suggest our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes. This is mind boggling!
I wanna know what you're think-- ...
/Checks calendar
/Sees its 2014
/Realizes comment guy won't get the reference
Never mind. I'll show myself out.
March 18th, 2014 at 10:18 AM ^
This man discovered this in the 1980's. They went to his house to give him the news. This is great. http://gawker.com/watch-a-stanford-physicist-find-out-he-was-right-about-1546271502