Earliest Stellar Objects Found

Microsofts slave writes "Scientists belive that they have found the earliest objects (new zork times registration required) in space. 26 galaxies and three quasars were observed at thirteen billion light years away, at time when the universe is belived to have been only 1 billion years old."

Dumb cosmology question?

[MacAndrew]

If everything started with a Big Bang [nasa.gov] from a singularity roughly 10-20 billion years ago, how is it that things came to be physcially 13 billion or more light years apart? I understand that the "Doppler" redshift is caused by great speed away from us. But is the universe seriously expanding at anything near lightspeed?

Some suggest [berkeley.edu] that initial expansion was faster than light speed, and that the Hubble expansion is accelerating.

Re:weird

[Tablizer]

If so, that means the average rate of expansion of the universe since that time had to be at least 4/5 C

I believe the current belief is that the "other side" is heading away already beyond C. We will never see that stuff and there is no way that a Dr. Evil on that side can catch us (under current phyz.) Perhaps this is the anthropic principle protecting us.

(The anthropic principle is cool. I always wanted to start a cult around it -- a more logical El Ron :-)

Re:Dumb cosmology question?

[smallfries]

Thanks for clearing that up. I can now see where you're coming from on the open universe angle.

One thing that still doesn't make sense though; If the observable universe will grow without limit then the distance that we can see further back in time will also grow without limit - isn't this a contradiction with the claim that that time started at a finite distance in the past?