I'm re-asking, maybe I can phrase better. Speed of light, telescopes?

A telescope cannot see an object beyond the distance light has travelled since that object emitted the light. I'll give a couple scenarios:

1. Assume that the Big Bang occurred and sent matter expanding into space. Now assume that the Big Bang occurred 15 billion years ago and that before the Big Bang there were no bodies emitting light. This means that even if we build a telescope that can detect light from 16 billion light-years away, there would be nothing to see because there wasn't enough light before 15 billion years ago.

2. Assume that an observer is moving at 0.5c away from the center of the universe, and an object is moving in the opposite direction at 0.6c away from the center of the universe, i.e. we could draw a straight line connecting the observer and the object and it would pass through the center of the universe. Then the observer would never see the light emitted by the object because they are moving apart at (0.5+0.6)c = 1.1c, and of course, light moves at c.

So my answer is that your scenario "Has any telescope found a section of space beyond the speed of light, just blank, not blocked by clouds? Where light has not reached us but may someday?" is most certainly possible. Do I know of any specific examples? No. I would suggest asking Neil deGrasse Tyson, or maybe someone affiliated with an astronomy club or observatory. I've referenced a few links below.

We get that all the time but not in a noticeable way as single observations.

Light travels at a certain speed. At that speed it travels a particular distance since it was formed. A photon created two days ago and heading our way arrives today and yesterday it wasn't visible...it was beyond the speed of light as you put it.

Since the universe began, or rather when it got into a state that light could travel in, the earliest bits of light have been travelling at the speed of light.

That was around 13.7 billion years ago in current reckoning so anything more than 13.7 billion light years away is 'beyond the speed of light' and not observable. The universe is expanding so that light wasn't 13.7 billion light years from us when it started out.The expansion of space makes it have a longer wavelength so the light also looks redder to us than when it started. The amount of reddening, called the redshift, is a means of finding out how far the light has traveled.

The furthest that telescopes have yet seen is not far short of the maximum thought to be possible. A gamma ray burst was recorded last October, and is estimated to be 13 billion light years away.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080919-gamma... . . . . .

Anything closer than that object is therefore not 'beyond the speed of light'. If it can't be seen it's being obscured by space gases or dust or it just isn't bright enough for us to see it anyway.

Not everything sends out light. Some stars are too cool to shine with light but they send out longer frequencies in the radio wavelengths.

As optical and radio telescopes get more powerful, more of those objects are detected.

For distance, it's getting close to what can be done, unless current ideas about space and light are wrong.

It wouldn't be the first time, and nothing in physics is absolutely set in stone, but current ideas do explain a lot, not everything, about what seems to be happening.

You can't say "There's nothing after this" because we can only see to the edge of the observable universe, not the whole lot of it, but it isn't a straightforward situation because of the expansion of the universe.

Here is an explanation of it....it's from UCLA, one of the most respected universities for cosmology.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.ht... . . . . .

Chuckle...

Century, was it smoking Number Six? I think those teggies up there might say something about that, or was it the currant buns that did it?

No, telescope receive lights and other electromagnetic radiations, and light can travel only at speed of light, so we cannot see anything beyond the distance light can travel since big bang. But during inflation period right after big bang, universe did expand faster than speed of light. So maybe there is such a thing as edge of universe beyond which is just blank.

"... beyond the speed of light" ? Does not compute. Kind of like asking if anywhere in the lower 48 US states is beyond the speed of my car. There are places where my car can't go, but it has nothing to do with speed.

Yes, astronomers have found places where there are no stars. They call them "the space between stars". After all, the universe is not 100% full of stars, there is lots of space between them. Take another look at the Hubble deep space images. Does it look to you like it is 100% stars and galaxies, with zero space between them?

If you look far enough away, what you see is the Cosmic Background Radiation, the leftover glow from the hot early universe. But the hot early universe was ionized and therefore opaque, and you can't see through it to the "empty spaces" you're talking about, regions too distant for light to have reached us yet.

No, our entire universe - everything.. is physics in motion... and the 'speed-limit' everywhere is the same: the speed light, 670 616 629 mph or 1079252850 km/hr... SMOKIN'..!!

We are seeing ancient history when we look out into space via Hubble deep field. The light we see left those galaxies.. BILLIONS of years ago. So, yes, soon.. we will detect images from 'near' the original big-bang. And 'near-nearer' is relative. Maybe down to the hundreds of millions of LY (years) pre 'big-bang'..

Assume the Universe is 13,752,345,221 years old. Then light from beyond 13,752,345,221 years has not yet reached us, but light from 13,752,345,222 light years away WILL reach us for the first time next year.

There are giant spaces out there that we haven't observed. If it did find something beyond the reach of light, we wouldn't be able to see it, so it would appear to us as nothing.. just the emptiness of space.

But we have mapped parts of the known universe, and there are HUGE spaces between where we've mapped.

there are always blank spaces between the galaxies, just look at Hubble's "deep space field" pics