Universe 46 BLY wide but only 13.8 b-y-o?

How can the visible universe be 46 billion light-years in radius when the universe is only 13.8 billion years old? How can the visible universe be 46 billion light-years (BLY) in radius when the universe is only 13.8 billion years old?

And how can we detect light 46 billion light-years away when the universe has been in existence for only a fraction of that time?

Astronomers widely accept that the universe formed in a Big Bang [with no precedent, everything blowing up into existence out of nothing, with scientists claiming to be superior to religieux IF they be given just this one miracle to explain how everything began] approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

It has been expanding ever since [which it has not but how else to explain the Doppler effect redshift than to say everything is moving apart when it is not].

This expansion explains how a 13.8-billion-year-old universe can be so much larger than 13.8 billion light-years across.

First of all, [scientists] should explain that the light-speed limit that relativity imposes on objects within the universe does not apply to the universe itself.

• [Why? God doesn't follow His own rules imposed on everyone else like "thou shalt not kill" because as God and the model, He kills everyone he wants like the Demiurge of which the Gnostics speak.]

UFO or capsule debris on the surface of Mars

In fact, we can't refer to an absolute expansion speed of the universe because we can't measure it in reference to anything external.

We can only gauge the "speeds" of distant galaxies that are receding from us relative to our own position.

Apart from those that are gravitationally bound (such as, say, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies), all galaxies appear to be moving away from each other as the "space-time" in which they're embedded expands.

The more distant the galaxy, the faster its recession velocity, as noted by the Hubble Law. As a consequence of this expansion, a galaxy's location changes considerably during the period of time that its light requires to travel to us. More

• Southworth Planetarium Director Edward Herrick-Gleason, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine, Astronomy Magazine staff (MSN.com) How can the visible universe be..., June 12, 2024; Sheldon S., Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Space: Farthest, Oldest Object Seen

(BBC News: Gemini 2009, Hubble 2004, Apache 1998)

Space.com

A stellar explosion has smashed the record for most distant object in the known universe.

The gamma-ray burst came from about 13 billion light-years away, and represents a relic from when the universe was just 630 million years old.

"It easily surpassed the most distant galaxies and quasars," said Edo Berger, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and a leading member of the team that first demonstrated the burst's origin. "In fact, it showed that we can use these spectacular events to pinpoint the first generation of stars and galaxies."

"The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive star," said Derek Fox, an astrophysicist at Penn State University. "We're seeing the demise of a star — and probably the birth of a black hole — in one of the universe's earliest stellar generations."

Gamma-ray bursts mark the dying explosion of large stars that have run out of fuel. The collapsing star cores form either black holes or neutron stars that create an intense burst of high-energy gamma-rays and form some of the brightest explosions in the early universe.

A light-year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). So astronomers are seeing this particular burst as it existed 13 billion years ago, because... More>>

Mystery Blob Discovered Near Dawn of Time

Jeremy Hsu (Space.com)
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.

"I have never heard about any [similar] objects that could be resolved at this distance," said Masami Ouchi, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, Calif. "It's kind of record-breaking."

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.

The cloud predates similar blobs, known as Lyman-Alpha blobs, which existed when the universe was 2 billion to 3 billion years old. Researchers named their new find Himiko, after an ancient Japanese queen with an equally murky past.

Himiko holds more than 10 times as much mass as the next largest object found in the early universe, or roughly the equivalent mass of 40 billion suns. At 55,000 light years across, it spans about half the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy.

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Lyman-Alpha blobs remain a mystery because existing telescopes have a hard time peering so far back to nearly the dawn of the universe. More>>

• Images: Hubble's New Views of the Universe
• Video: Galaxy Collisions
• Vote: The Strangest Things in Space