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Dawn's First Light
Uosdwis writes "Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have detected light that may be from the earliest objects in the universe. If confirmed, the observation provides a glimpse of an era more than 13 billion years ago when, after the fading embers of the theorized Big Bang gave way to millions of years of pervasive darkness, the universe came alive."
I think 'light' is a broadly applied term here, and fact is, the method they used was to measure cosmic radiation, and subtract from it the radiation levels of known galaxies to arrive at an amount that "must" be leftover from stars long past.
This CNN article put it best: "The exercise was like taking a recording of a stadium full of loud people and subtracting the noise of every person except one to hear the voice of that single individual."
Actually, according to Einstein's Principle of Equivalence, every and each person can define him/herself as the center of the Universe.
Try to verify for yourself by doing the following:
(1) get a blank sheet of paper,
(2) mark a dot (visibly large, but not terribly so) on the sheet,
(3) and then mark more dots around them,
(4) now take the sheet to a copier and copy it in the original size,
then copy it again but with some magnification at this time
(e.g., 125%)...be sure to print on transparency sheets.
(5) now put the magnified transparency overlaid onto the original
(use the first marker at (2) as a reference first)...you see
all the dots are moving away from the first dot.
(6) Now shift the reference point to another dot...choose whatever.
You'll notice that, whatever dot you choose, the other dots
appear to move away from it. Hence, everyone can be the center
of the Universe.