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The other day I blogged that the Hubble photo was a glimpse into the suburbs of the universe. Of course this isn’t true at all. In fact we live on the edge of the universe. Every moment, as the universe keeps expanding, we get further and futher away from the Big Bang. So any photograph that sees 12 billion years into the past is actually looking towards the centre of the universe, or downtown.

In 1964, the echoes of the bigbang were discovered. The entire universe is bathed in cosmic background radiation which is essentially the sound of the Big Bang cooking everything up. If we look far enough back we see nothing but smooth energy. The above photo is a representation of this, except that it gives the impression that the cosmic background radiation is OUTSIDE of us, as if we live in a fishbowl universe, floating around. In reality our universe is more like a balloon, being inflated. We are on the outside of the balloon getting further and further away from everything. So the background radiation is in our past, in the direction from which we have come.

In other words, welcome to the suburbs folks.