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Old 23-January-2004, 11:54 PM
rwald rwald is offline
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My guess is that the question "How far away is such-and-such galaxy now?" doesn't really have meaning, because for all we know such-and-such galaxy was swallowed by a black hole centuries ago. All we can really tell is what was happening when it last emitted light that we now see.

However, that makes me even more uncomfortable about your question: If we see a quasar (or whatever) 10 billion light-years away, does that mean that 10 billion years ago (only 3.7 billion years after the Big Bang), the universe was already 10 billion light-years across? One possible resolution to this would be if the universe were infinte spacially, but I'm not sure if that's the right answer.
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