In The Beginning
By: Hubert Crowell
Three of the most powerful and thought provoking words ever written, "In The Beginning." We have no way of knowing what was before "The Beginning" and we do not know when the "Beginning" started. All we can do is look back in time.
As a kid I remember laying out in the empty lot next to our house and watching the meteor
showers in August(1). Street lights were not common then and you could actually see the milky
way and thousand of stars on a clear night. I often wondered what was out there and how far it
went.
Looking back in time, when we look at the planets and our sun we are looking back in time about six minutes. What we see has already occurred six minutes ago. When we look at the stars we are looking back in time about 100 years! If we then use a telescope and look beyond our galaxy the Milky Way, we can see other galaxies as they existed millions of years ago. As a matter of fact one of the closest galaxies is Andromeda and the light that we see from Andromeda is two million years old! Andromeda may not be anything at all like what we currently see in the night sky.
As our telescopes improve and we place more of them into space, we get a much clearer image
and more details about our neighbors in space, but we are still looking at the past. We cannot see
what is going on in the present. Great things could be happening right now and we would have to
wait millions of years to find out about it.
If the Big Bang(2) theory is true, and I have no reason to doubt this theory, then all of the galaxies are traveling away from each other at great speeds. If I compare this with a balloon being inflated, then there must be a great gulf or blank space in the middle where the Big Bang occurred.
Our Milky Way must be on the surface of this great balloon and what we see are only the closest galaxies that are traveling outward with us. We cannot see all the galaxies on the other side of the great balloon.
We have no ideal how large this balloon is or where the center of it is. And we don't even know
if there are other great balloons out there expanding just like us.
In 2004 scientists believe that they found the most-distant galaxy(3) that can be seen with our current telescopes. It is estimated to be 13 billion light-years away, seen at a time when the universe was just 700 to 750 million years old and they estimate the age of our universe at 13.7(4) billion years old(5). I am not a scientist, but if the Big Bang theory is true, then it has taken at least 26 billion years for this distance galaxy to get this far from us if it was traveling at half the speed of light. And how much further has it traveled in the 13 billion years, it has taken the light to get to us?
The new found galaxy has a red-shift of 6.6 to 7, which if I understand red-shift, this means that
the galaxy is moving away from us at about 7% of the speed of light. So instead of taking 26
billion years to get that far away from us it would have taken 186 billion years!
As I lay there viewing the awesome night sky it all became so overwhelming that I had to quit
thinking about it all and get back down to earth and deal with things I could see and touch. I
think that we all do that as we grow up. We turn off the things that we don't understand and tend
to deal with the simpler things of life. However it seems to always creep back into our minds and
we continue to search for answers. And the best answer I have found is still, "In The Beginning
God created the heavens."
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids
2. See http://www.big-bang-theory.com/
3. Most-distance galaxy http://www.big-bang-theory.com/
4. See BBC News at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1950403.stm
5. See also: Age of the Universe by Jon Covey, B.A., MT (ASCP), CLS Anita K. Millen, M.D. At: http://www.ldolphin.org/univ-age.html
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