A science question :] 10 points [duh]?

Question

Why does the light from distant galaxies support the big-bang theory?

Answer 1

I think that they say that if everything exploded, the stuff that was going faster would have gone farther, and therefor the stuff that is farther must be going faster, which, they say, is why the farthest stuff is more red shifted -- because they assume that since it's farther, it must still be going faster.

(I have not found convincing evidence of the big bang myself, so really you should wait until someone who believes in the big bang comes along to explain it better then I do.)

http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/...

In order for me (or you) to believe in the big bang, we have to believe (we can't know) that a long long time ago, far far away, there was nothing. Then the vacuum fluctuated. Then there was a singularity, about the size of a dime. (It would have been a quarter dollar, but the tooth fairy took it) Then there was energy, and the laws of physics as we know them did not exist, then all of matter formed.

In other words, we have to believe based on someone, whom we've never met, telling us something that we've never seen and they've never seen which today is impossible, and which has never even been proved or demonstrated to be possible.

In any other setting that would be considered a faith -- not hard-factual science.

If you want a faith to explain it, then I have a much better one -- "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." It's even honest in that it admits to be a faith!

Furthermore, significant government money has been thrown behind research to prove the big bang. I wonder how much money can be put behind an idea before it's hard to tell whether the idea lives off of evidence or off of government money.

I think they also use background radiation to "prove" that the big bang created it all.

They use the false logic that "If it could be, it must be" and say that since the big bang COULD have created a background temperature, that it must have. But of course as long as there are other possibilities that also "could be" then the logic is flawed.

Same thing applies to red shift -- we do know that velocity difference causes red-shift, but we don't know that it's the only thing that causes redshift.

For example, if light, which we know does interact with matter, being slowed down as it passes through, may be changed in other ways too as it passes through astronomically great distances. We do know that a shorter wavelength photon has much more energy then a longer wavelength photon. That's why infrared doesn't hurt us, just warms us, but ultraviolet burns us and kills germs.

If a photon were to lose energy as it traveled from a distance star, it might lose it in wavelength, which would also cause a red-shift. If this were true, then  redshift would be partially a result of mere distance, and partially a result of whatever gases the light had passed through.

Perhaps someone more familiar with the topic can help us out here -- but using the redshift as a speed measurement (I think) seems to indicate that everything is moving away from the earth -- as if the earth were the center of the big bang.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

There was a famous experiment conducted several years (almost two decades) ago called the COBE mission. It was the "Cosmic background explorer". It recorded the background electromagnetic radiation (some of which was light) from all the distant parts of the universe, including distant galaxies. This light showed a residual black body phenomena temperature, and suggested it shared one big cosmological event aka the big bang.

Answer 3

Not light, but spectrum.

Spectrum from distant galaxies is going to red from time to time.

It mean that the galaxy is moving away from our planet (or every point in this universe)

Answer 4

Its the red shift

Answer 5

It's not so much the light itself, but the fact that all the light from all the galaxies looks redder to us than it actually is at the source. This is because when the sources of waves (light waves, sound waves) move away from an observer, the waves seem longer to the observer. Think of how a train or ambulance sounds higher-pitched coming towards you and lower-pitched going away from you. This principle is known as the Doppler shift.

Because light looks redder to us from galaxies in every direction away from us, it means that everything in the universe is moving away from us.

This tells is that the universe itself is expanding.