Looking Back in Time

as we look into our telescopes, we are looking into the past, so then, theoritically we could someday build a telescope which would see so far back that we could observe the creation of the universe! why not?
- christos
toronto,ontario

We can get pretty close. The cosmic microwave background radiation has been travelling pretty much undisturbed since a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. That’s about 13 billion years ago.  It lets us see back to that era. Earlier times have to be inferred from less direct measurements, since most other particles bounced off others sometime in between then and now, scrambling the picture.
Mike W.

(published on 11/29/2007)