Did light initially come from a Big Bang or an already constructed Star and Sun?
830049
The light was here first, but it was not constructed and it will be the last Man you will see.
92532
The big bang; the theory that the solar system was created by a large explosion of dust and gas. The dust and gas was pulled together over many years by gravity and formed the planets.
604533
If you believe the theory of creation, found in all major religions, you don't have a problem answering your own question.  If you subscribe to the 'Big Bang' theory (or a derivitive thereof), I would have to ask 'Who lit the fuse?'
671170
Are you including the stars that are being created, as well as those that do not actually exist anymore but have died out/ supernova'd/ etc. that we are just still seeing since the light has to travel so far?  \n\nI would be interested in how you determined this number ^_^
1024461
The discovery of  the universe expansion(doppler red shifted spectrum lines) was the source of the Big Bang theory (i think)\n\nBTW: this is a SCIENCE thread, all you Jesus Freak back off!\nthe theory of the Big Bang is compatible with the concept of a god.\nwhat was there before the big bang ..let there be light....BANG.
252206
I believe the correct term that you are looking for is "dark matter".\nConsider this: If all of space is filled with very bright stars, then why is it mainly dark.\nScientists came up with the theory of "dark matter", theoretical matter that absorbs the brightness of the stars.\nHowever, my theory is that space is just so completely vast and the stars are so far apart that there is just not enough light to fill it.\nConsider this: you are standing in the middle of a large room with no light. You take out a flashlight...how far can you see? It depends on the size of the room, right. If it is a small room, then the light beam from your flashlight may be able to reach one wall of the room...but say this room is very very large. Would you be able to see the wall then, considering you are standing in the middle of the room?\nSpace has no walls or boundaries...how far would your flashlight see then?...\nSo that's the "dark matter" theory and my theory.\nCiao!
881761
Hi. You are pretty optimistic about the development of science without the wonder of the night sky. Assuming we were still a curious breed and tried to mimic birds then I would suspect the sight of the sun would start a new religion.
538835
It's known that dark matter existed before 'something' caused the explosion of light.\n\nSome scientist think that is was a build up of ions/neutrons or some such, which caused the 'bang'.\n\nMany also believe that, because the universe is expanding at a faster rate than previously imagined, some day the whole thing may return to a 'dark' state as galaxies travel beyond the reach of observation.\n\n(By that time, our Galaxy will have been swallowed by the black hole which is keeping it 'captured'.)
1073548
The Big Bang theory is the most popular one. It is hypothesized that the universe was a collection of dust and other particles forming to one huge mass, until heat and gases formed and pressure from gravity and mass caused it all to erupt in one "big bang" causing everything to project and very high speeds in all directions.\n\nOur world was theorize to have originated through this process. The debris and particles that were projected from the point of origin (now the sun) and locked into its gravitation rotation. The larger mass debris attracted other smaller debris by its gravitational pull to form an even larger mass.\nThis mass growing in size of gases, dust and other particles started to alter by factoring conditions such as distance from the sun and compostion of gases and such. Eventually providing the right conditions and atmosphere to form water which is the basis of life. From that life was made sustainable by the oxygen created by water and plant life... so a billion bunch years later we have our planet earth and the universe we live in surrounded by other planets and stars.\n\nThere are also legends and tales from various religions and cultures that tell the begins of our universe and earth. You'll have to look these up and see.
831523
When there was nothing there was probably no light. My favourite theory (because I can undestand it) is that "nothing" is actually a "quantum foam" of matter and anti-matter popping in and out of existence continually. So 0=+1-1. There is experimental evidence for the existence of this quantum foam. Before the big bang the universe would have been an infinite "nothing" of quantum foam. However, each of these tiny matter/anti-matter formation/anihilation events would produce a tiny gravitational wave. Over (infinite) time these gravitational waves could grow by constructive interference until a huge gravitational wave (rather like the occasional huge freak waves in our oceans) produced the special conditions required to trigger the big bang and caused a huge separation of matter and anti-matter. So the "spark" was simply a result of random noise eventually building to the point to set things off.\n\nI have a personal theory that the "virtual" gravity caused by the quantum foam might explain the missing dark matter and/or dark energy in our universe.
505300
god has no beginning and has no end\nhe wasnt created\nhe is since forever and will stay forever\nno time limits\nand the creation of the universe started with the BIG BANG which was an expolosion emmitting light.....\nso light basically was one of the first creations\nand god commanded...and things came into existance!
955705
If the theory is indeed correct, the only possibility is that matter/energy pre-existed the "big bang", and all that the "big bang" accomplished was rearranging things.  This is perhaps an interesting theory on how things were formed from pre-existent matter, but hardly a good explanation of the origin of matter.  It has been fairly well established that matter and energy are somehow the same thing.  According to the law of entropy, if energy always existed, it would inevitably (after an infinite period of time) be evenly distributed by the actions of random process.  Since this is not the case (stars are obviously hot spots in the soup of matter), matter cannot possibly be infinitely old.  So we find ourselves coming back to the question of origin, again...
496226
STARS AND NEBULAE.\n\nMost of the things you can see in the night sky are stars: a few thousand are visible to the unaided eye. A star is a hot ball of mostly hydrogen gas; the Sun is an example of a typical, ordinary star. Gravity keeps the gas from evaporating into space, and pressure due to the star's high temperature and density keeps the ball from shrinking. In the core of the star, the temperature and densities are high enough to sustain nuclear fusion reactions, and the energy produced by these reactions works its way to the surface and radiates into space as heat and light. When the fuel for the fusion reactions is depleted, the structure of the star changes. The process of building up heavier elements from lighter ones by nuclear reactions, and adjusting the internal structure to balance gravity and pressure, is called stellar evolution. \nLooking at a star through a telescope can tell us many of its important properties. The color of a star tells us its temperature, and the temperature depends on some combination of the star's mass and evolutionary phase. Usually, observations also allow us to find the luminosity of the star, or the rate at which it radiates energy as heat and light. \nAll stars visible to the unaided eye are in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way is system of roughly 100 billion stars, along with a great deal of interstellar material. The galaxy is shaped like a flattened disk embedded in a round, faint halo. Gravity keeps the stars from drifting away, and the motions of the stars keep the system from falling in on itself. The Milky Way has no distinct edge - the distribution of stars tapers off gradually with increasing distance from the center. The SDSS detects stars more than a million times fainter than can be seen with the unaided eye, far enough to see the outer structure of the Milky Way. \nStar Colors and Luminosities: The H-R Diagram\nAstronomers often make plots of the luminosities of stars compared to their colors. The first such charts were made in the early twentieth century, when astronomers took spectra of thousands of stars, then placed the spectra into a sequence based on the appearance of several different features. The classes of stars were given different letters as names; in order of decreasing temperature, they are OBAFGKMLT. The hottest stars are class O, while the coolest are class T. Two astronomers, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell, independently started to wonder what would happen if they compared stars' luminosities to their spectral classifications (or, alternatively, to their temperatures). They knew that some stars were hotter and more luminous than the sun, and that others were cooler and less luminous. Hertzsprung and Russell found that 90% of the stars fell into a narrow band they termed the "main sequence." Today, we call this type of plot a Hertzsprung-Russell (or H-R) diagram. \nAstronomers further divide each letter into ten categories from 0 to 9, with 0 being the hottest star in that spectral class and 9 being the coolest. So, a B1 star is hotter than a B2 star, and a B9 star is hotter than an A0 star. Our own sun is at the "hot" end of the G range with a surface temperature of 5,770° K; therefore, it's called a G2 star. \nSpectral classes give us a convenient way to refer to most types of stars - from O0, the hottest at over 25,000° K, down to T9, the coolest failed stars at 1,000° K. Each spectral type of star is associated with a specific color: all G-type stars like the sun are yellow, all M-type stars appear red, and all B-type stars are bluish. Thus, this system of letters and numbers tells us where a star is on the horizontal (color or temperature) axis of the H-R diagram. \nTwo alternative systems tell us approximately where on the vertical (luminosity) axis a star can be found. One system uses absolute magnitude, a measure of luminosity derived from the apparent magnitude, or brightness of the star
854866
Everything we know about, everything we can see, behaves as if 13.7 billion years ago it was a dense, hot plasma that has been expanding and cooling ever since.  That's the Big Bang theory, and there is a tremendous amount of overlapping, detailed evidence to show that it's correct.  The Big Bang theory being wrong is about as likely, and makes about as much sense, as the idea that a Sun-centered solar system is wrong.  Essentially all of modern astronomy depends on the Big Bang to make sense.  The main observations are:\n\n1) The redshift of more distant galaxies is larger than that of nearby galaxies.\n\n2) Quasars and radio sources are seen to evolve.  There were many quasars in the past, now there are almost none.\n\n3) The amounts of the light elements Deuterium and Hydrogen make sense in the context of neucleosynthesis in the Big Bang.\n\n4) The Cosmic Microwave Backround Radiation is as predicted by the Big Bang theory, both in magnitude and in the details of its anisotropy in amplitude and polarization.\n\n5) All stars and galaxies evolve as if that evolution were set into motion by the Big Bang.\n\n\nYour notion of mirages and crests makes no sense in the context of modern physics.  We do see some warpage of space, particularly gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies, but the Cosmic Microwave Background is most certainly only 400,000 lightyears from our event horizon.\n\nMany current versions of the Big Bang involve a Universe that exists eternally in both the past and future.  Our Big Bang was not necessarily the beginning of the Universe.
345361
The Big Bang theory offers a resolution of your question (also known as Olbers's Paradox). In a universe with a beginning we can receive light only from that part of the universe close enough so that light has had time to travel from there to here since the Big Bang (about 10 billion years ago). So, even if space extends infinitely far, only a limited region, and a limited number of stars, are visible to us. And the accumulated light from this limited number of stars is not sufficient to spoil the darkness of the night sky.\n\nGod is spelled B-I-G B-A-N-G\nPBrax@netscape.com
1175242
Although this issue has not been totally resolved, many astronomers now believe that so-called quasars (quasi-stellar objects) are the second step in the formation and evolution of new galaxies. So far, all new galaxies have been observed at distances that place them in time only about one-billion years after the Big Bang event. It's generally accepted that the first step in new-galaxy formation must have been the formation of massive black holes located in dense regions of the the universal gas that filled the young universe. As immense quantities of this gassy material was accelerated into the black hole at near light speed, high-energy radiation was generated to flash outward. Some 12-billion years later we observe these radiation sources as quasars.
647430
I have indeed considered this. The problem is scientific observation has not agreed with the concept of random quantum mechanics created all the matter in the universe.\n\nThe problem with this idea is how do you explain massive concentrations of matter like Suns. if you want to say random particles colided together and created the massive volume that is a sun then fine. How long would such a thing take? With all the suns in our Galaxy alone how is that possible especially considering you only have about a billion year window before most of your stars start dieing off their is simply too much matter.\n\nWhat is far more likely is the Big Bang. The reason I say this is because of two critical observations. The fact that distant Galaxy's are moving away from us at a constant rate or what is called red shift. If the Universe was formed by random particles why is their a constant drift from a center point? \n\nThe second point is because of what is called cosmic radiation. The theory put out was if at one time the universe was smaller and hotter then their would be cosmic radiation and space would be about 2-4 Kelvin and that's exactly what we found. If what you are saying is true then the temperature of the universe should be at absolute zero.\n\nIf you wish I could recommend some books on the subject.