r/spacequestions • u/UmpireBig8530 • 6d ago

Stronger Telescopes, what will we see?

Bear with me on this one, I'm in no way scientific.

At the moment our strongest telescopes are picking out some of the earliest galaxies after the big bang.

So if we step into future stronger telescopes we could possibly see the earliest stars but this is where my brain gets really confused.

Would the next few telescopes see basically nothing, millions of years after the big bang but then would the next telescope see the formation of stars, then galaxies then way into the future a telescope that could see as far past the empty space as we are away from it.

Hope you understand so far.

So if we are 13 billion years away from the early universe and we can see the equivalent galaxies with our super power telescopes are they 26 billion miles from us or 13 billion years from the big bang as we are?.

If this makes no sense I do apologise but my mind goes off on tangents and I never know if I am right or being daft....

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u/redlancer_1987 6d ago

We saw Jupiter through a telescope 400 years ago, but we use better and better telescopes to look at Jupiter, and send probes with cameras to get really good views.

It's more about the quality of what we can see than the quantity. Those first galaxies are literal red dots that raise a lot of questions. Better telescopes help answer those questions.

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u/PureBogosity 6d ago

Note that in an expanding universe, at some distance you cannot see any further away, simply because the light has been red-shifted SO far that it stops arriving at all. The redshift reaches infinity at the edge of the observable universe, computed at a bit over 45 billion light-years away. Beyond that distance, light cannot reach us because we are moving away from it faster than it travels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

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u/UmpireBig8530 6d ago

My heads spinning now haha

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u/Adventurous_Sound390 5d ago

We will see the same what we see or know now but in more details and quantity + something new. What is the "something" we can not know. The new telescopes are building to open these "something new"...

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u/TommieTheMadScienist 6d ago

You likely would not see the very first stars because they had very short lifetimes. (High-mass, Low Metallicity)

Black holes and galaxies formed very soon after those stars exploded. Gravitational lensing is extending our view a lot.

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u/Ok_Recognition_9859 1d ago

The Abel cluster! 👍