Astronomers analyzing two of the deepest views of the cosmos made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a gold mine of galaxies, more than 500 that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies thrived when the cosmos was less than 7 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years. This sample represents the most comprehensive compilation of galaxies in the early universe, researchers said.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/r...s/2006/12/text/
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/r...rmat/web_print/
And there's more :
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2006/44/
But how did so many big structures form so quickly?
I tend to assume the Big Bang wasn't a single shot event but an ongoing process. Imagine that space locally was distorted in the past and creates after-images that are distorted.
The further away or longer ago an object existed, the longer the image is subjected to distortions in space between events occuring then and now.
If you look at an atom, it also appears to have a blurred, cloudly, chaotic and/or nebulous form, with difficult to pin down spacial attributes but this can be seen because the spaces through which the electrons move don't correlate well with the 3 dimensions shared on a larger scale, so it appears chaotic with formless characteristics because its motion isn't "coherent" relative to the 3 dimensional space we see on larger scales.
In quantum mechanics, there's an annoying potentially infinite energy everywhere that's removed from the equations. This could represent having selected a specific set of physical laws out of a range of possibilities. If those laws have drifted over time, then systems on different scales of space or time could appear distorted and chaotic in comparison without easy to observe spacial features to give reliable measures of time or distances between dynamics of the two. (Bose Einstein condensates I believe are a more direct way in which this phenomenon is observed - two systems isolated from each other become incoherent and appear merged because they lack an ability to keep features between the two in "sync" with each other).
It was assumed initially that if space wasn't expanding we should be seeing the surface of a star everywhere we looked and space would be extremely hot and energetic. Well, maybe it really is hot as hell in here
, but we've come to ignore it or maybe more accurately it's gone unnoticed, and it's just seen as a small amount of background noise we haven't been able to entirely ignore. (The idea of an expansion into a vacuum is fine, but I don't think space and the underlying vacuum are the same thing, so you could also see this expansion as a diffusion within space itself and so it doesn't necessarily appear as a true physical expansion ... in this case light could even appear to slow over time because it's continually moving through denser and denser space)
Then again, I could be full of b.s. Take what you want and toss the rest.
The further away or longer ago an object existed, the longer the image is subjected to distortions in space between events occuring then and now.
If you look at an atom, it also appears to have a blurred, cloudly, chaotic and/or nebulous form, with difficult to pin down spacial attributes but this can be seen because the spaces through which the electrons move don't correlate well with the 3 dimensions shared on a larger scale, so it appears chaotic with formless characteristics because its motion isn't "coherent" relative to the 3 dimensional space we see on larger scales.
In quantum mechanics, there's an annoying potentially infinite energy everywhere that's removed from the equations. This could represent having selected a specific set of physical laws out of a range of possibilities. If those laws have drifted over time, then systems on different scales of space or time could appear distorted and chaotic in comparison without easy to observe spacial features to give reliable measures of time or distances between dynamics of the two. (Bose Einstein condensates I believe are a more direct way in which this phenomenon is observed - two systems isolated from each other become incoherent and appear merged because they lack an ability to keep features between the two in "sync" with each other).
It was assumed initially that if space wasn't expanding we should be seeing the surface of a star everywhere we looked and space would be extremely hot and energetic. Well, maybe it really is hot as hell in here
, but we've come to ignore it or maybe more accurately it's gone unnoticed, and it's just seen as a small amount of background noise we haven't been able to entirely ignore. (The idea of an expansion into a vacuum is fine, but I don't think space and the underlying vacuum are the same thing, so you could also see this expansion as a diffusion within space itself and so it doesn't necessarily appear as a true physical expansion ... in this case light could even appear to slow over time because it's continually moving through denser and denser space)Then again, I could be full of b.s.
Take what you want and toss the rest.
StevenA. I don't believe in the Big Bang for the many problems with it but I can see problems with an infinitely old steady state universe too. I think at this point in time till we learn some hard facts that we know are hard facts, any theory is as good as any other theory.