Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.

Was the Big Bang really visible on earth?

I have just read this on Wikipedia :-

GRB 090423 is a gamma-ray burst (GRB) discovered by the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission on April 23, 2009 at 07:55:19 UTC.[1] The burst lasted 10 seconds and was located in the constellation Leo (RA: 09h 55m 33.08s; Dec: +18° 08′ 58.9″).[1][2] At a redshift of z = 8.2,[3][4][5][6] the burst is the current record holder for the most distant observed GRB,[7] as well as the most distant object of any kind.[2][8] GRB 090423 is also the oldest known object in the universe, as the light from the burst took approximately 13 billion years to reach Earth.[9] The event occurred roughly 630 million years after the Big Bang,[7] confirming that massive stellar births (and deaths) did indeed occur in the very early universe.[10]

The light from the GRB 13 billion years ago reached Earth this year and that was only 630 million years after the big bang. So, my 'logic' suggests that a creature on earth 630 million years ago would have seen the big bang, and 631 million years ago it would have witnessed the universe 1 million years before the big bang.

Can this really be true, or am I going completely mad?

Update:

I dont understand why some people make a point about the earth not existing until 10 billion years after the creation of the universe. The earth did not exist at the time of the GRB, but that did not stop the event being visible last April.

8 Answers

Relevance
  • 1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    The 630 million years refers to time after the Big Bang at which point the GRB occurred. The Earth was still about 10 BILLION years away from being formed at that point in time in the young universe.

  • 1 decade ago

    The Big Bang created time and space. It is true that by looking into the furthest reaches of the universe, we are "looking back in time", but this is not related to how far ago we made the observation. Imagine if the Herschel Space Telescope was around 4 billion years ago. Would it have been able to "see" the big bang?

    No - because the universe has been constantly expanding, like a balloon, so that we are further and further away from the beginning of time. From wikipedia:

    The age of the Universe is about 13.7 billion years, but due to the expansion of space we are now observing objects that are now considerably farther away than a static 13.7 billion light-years distance. The edge of the observable universe is now located about 46.5 billion light-years away.

    Edit - Man UK

    How do you explain cosmic background radiation then, if it is not the vestiges of the Big Bang? I completely disagree - we do not understand everything about how the universe was formed, but the Big Bang fits the theory best at the present time.

  • wiedyk
    Lv 4
    4 years ago

    The Earth replaced into no longer shaped in the great bang. The universe replaced into shaped even nevertheless it replaced into VERY diverse on the commencing up. there have been no stars or planets previously each and every thing. It even took a while for the 1st atoms to kind, and those have been all hydrogen and Helium. Then hundreds of thousands of years later the 1st stars shaped. hundreds of thousands of years after that the 1st stars to undergo supernova explosions created atoms different than hydrogen and helium, which contain carbon, oxygen, and iron. hundreds of thousands of years after that clouds of dirt and gas containing the recent atoms started forming new stars and planets, which contain the sunlight and Earth. it somewhat is barely incorrect to declare the Earth replaced into shaped in the great bang.

  • nick s
    Lv 6
    1 decade ago

    The fact that so many gave the thumbs down to Man UK's answer so that his answer became minimised, shows that the Big Bang has taken on religious context. It is a theory, and everything in science is questionable - that is what makes science different from religion. That is what makes science believable, that theories are always being tested.

    The Big Bang is the best fit for what is observed at the moment, but opens up more questions than it answers.

  • How do you think about the answers? You can sign in to vote the answer.
  • c3pnis
    Lv 6
    1 decade ago

    You are going completely mad.

    For starters, photons were not free to travel through the universe for the first 300,000 years, therefore no light could have been emitted. Secondly, there was no universe to witness 1 million years before the big bang.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    1 decade ago

    The earth was a part of the big bang dust. It didn't form until many years later.

  • 1 decade ago

    That would indeed be true if there were no such thing as time dilation.

  • 1 decade ago

    The so called "Big Bang" never happened , it is the biggest myth in science, in fact it is not science at all it is Religion masquerading as science.See Dr Rhawn Joseph's explanation below along with scientific papers from Dr Paul Marmet.

Still have questions? Get your answers by asking now.