Quote:
Originally Posted by Superman
This is interesting, and illustrates my quandry. How can two objects, which are "within" each others' perceivable Universe, become 13B light years distant in a span of 600M years? Perhaps the Earth and the exploding star have been receding from one another at a rate approaching light speed, causing the light from the star to be coming toward us at far less than light speed due to a Doppler Effect. And yet.....that defies the principle that light travels at......light speed.
I have a headache.
|
You're misreading things. The star formed and exploded 600 million years after the big Bang, which is the same as saying 13 billion years ago. It was never near us, and it hasn't traveled away from us. As was stated, it was LONG gone before the Earth (heck, before the Milky Way galaxy!) was even a twinkle in daddy's eyes.
Don't worry about the expansion of the Universe for this scenario, it's not particularly important, and it'll just give you headaches
What's important is that it's taken this long for the light to reach us (13 billion years), and therefore, this is one of the most distant stars we've seen. The more distant it is, the older it is (since it took 13 billion years to reach us). The older it is, the closer to the beginning it was. The closer to the beginning, the more likely it was made of primordial materials (close to the original 75% hydrogen, 25% helium, and nothing else). We need to verify those percentages in the very early universe to give support to both the Big Bang theory, and atomic theory that calculated the formation of those first building blocks.