Hubble Looks Deep in the Past

edo-01 writes: "The article says it best: "In the most distant observations yet by the Hubble Space Telescope, some astronomers think they are seeing evidence that the universe emerged from its initial darkness in a dawn of light that came up like thunder across the cosmos" Here is the press release, and here is an artist's rendition of what the vast stellar nurseries might have looked like. I must say I thought at first it was an actual image of the creation and almost swallowed my tongue..."

Comments

wow

[Bouillabaisse]

man, that artist's rendition is just unbelievable. i've seen some pretty darn good graphics done, but that is just awesome. it really captures the feel of what it might look like. makes you wonder how he thought of this, or what we actually know what it looks like. Were does all these ideas come from?

Old Light

[Euphonious Coward]

Every photon arriving at Hubble from so far off has been coursing across the universe for billions of years, and passing through billions of light-years of stuff.

Is there any reason to think those photons have not been changed by the experience? Might not many or most of the phenomena we attribute to "the early universe" be simple artifacts of the unimaginably long path the light took getting to us?

The reasonable baseline hypothesis (absent religious bias) is that the universe far away and long ago should be much like the universe nearby, today. Claims that it was fundamentally different should be treated as extraordinary, requiring extraordinary evidence. Such claims deserve special attention to processes that may produce artifacts.