Giant Mystery Blob Discovered Near Dawn of Time

[Tone]

2009 04 23 - By: Jeremy Hsu

A newly found primordial blob may represent the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, researchers announced today.

The gas cloud, spotted from 12.9 billion light-years away, could signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation back when the universe was just 800 million years old.

Read more:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 ... -blob.html


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[Mallas]

"A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). An object 12.9 billion light-years away is seen as it existed 12.9 billion years ago, and the light is just now arriving."

"Himiko sits right on the doorstep of an era called the reionization epoch, which lasted between 200 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang. That's when the universe had just emerged from its cosmic dark ages and had begun brightening through the formation of stars and galaxies. Hot, energized hydrogen gas from that time period has allowed astronomers to begin seeing some objects — as much good as it does to squint at such fuzzy blobs."

I can not get my head around something.

If these guys acknowledge the Big Bang theory and a massive explosion started off the universe and everything is moving out from that point, then I do not understand that "light is just now arriving"???

[rcglinsk]

It means that from the standpoint of the object that emitted the light it has taken 13 billion or however many years to get here. The reason is that the current universe is larger than the old universe and for a clock to think the speed of light was c when the light finally gets here it has to think the distance is 13 billion light years. If you were to get in a spaceship and start driving toward that object right now (suspend disbelief and say it's perpetual) and drive at v barely less than c from Earth's perspective it would take you much longer than 13 billion years to get there. A big bang theorist would say it depends on a variable called dark energy. Depending on it's value you'd get a different answer for how long it would take to get somewhere. The dark energy variable dominates the equation for the velocity of "the expansion of space" which is mathematically a metric in which the basic line element gradually gets larger over 0 < t < infinity.

Here's three things about big bang theory I don't understand:

If the metric is space and space is expanding and expanding space moves objects then why haven't old protons and electrons been torn apart? Or old quarks?

If expanding space moves objects why doesn't objects moving expand space? It's as though quarks are not just glued to each other but also glued to the metric, but when they move on their own they glide on the metric. When I was in school they taught me about something called inertia and a law of motion, can't really remember, but I don't think this jives.

If things like stars and atoms don't rip apart when the metric expands because gravity or the strong force keeps things together then where is the heat being released from the work? I also remember something called the second law of thermodynamics that this doesn't seem to satisfy.