THE NIGHT SKY

 

We should be able to see back to the Big Bang. It should fill the celestial sphere around us, but we cannot. We can only observe it as a microwave (or the Cosmic Background Radiation as seen by the Wilkinson Probe). We can see back eight billion years with terrestrial telescopes, and back to around 13 billion years ago with space-based telescopes.

The difficulty is due to the acceleration. The universe is accelerating, which means the collapse is getting faster, so the so-called speed of light has not always been 300,000 km/second. As the universe accelerates, the light from that long ago goes dim and we get cut off from our past. This loss of light has turned the void dark. In other words, due to the acceleration of the universe, we see twinkling stars in a black night sky.

 

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