As an expert in this space, I can confidently tell you that nothing about this observation is conclusive about the presence of the "First Stars" or what we call "Pop. III" Stars. By definition, the first stars are nearly completely devoid of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The spectra shows absolutely booming emission from Oxygen III ions at 5007A so there are heavy elements in the system and at best there is a mix of Pop III stars and more normal stars. The lifetimes of the stars are very short, ~3 Myr, so the chances of seeing them are very low which is likely the limiting factor (along with their brightness) and thus there is a strong Bayesian prior against seeing them with a narrow field of view. The mass of the system at 10^7.35 solar masses is much greater than what we expect from theoretical models that form Pop. III stars and you must ask how it's possible to not have any metals pollute the gas. The main piece of evidence for Pop III stars is HeII emission at 1640A which is a prediction of Pop. III stars, but you can also get this in many other ways, for example X-ray binaries. We see this plenty in the local Universe and we fully expect this to happen elsewhere. So to me this is headline chasing with little conclusive evidence.
Thanks! I've replaced the overstated title with what seems to be a better phrase from the first paragraph. If there's a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
The "isotope" part is a mistake in the article. The writers heard "He II" and very reasonably wrote down "helium-2", and added some exposition about that (hypothetical) nuclear isotope. But they're in fact unrelated things: "He II" in this context is an ionization state of helium (the +1 state) -- not an isotope. What the research is observing is high-energy radiation from stars stripping electrons from helium atoms. No rare isotopes in sight!
Also, spectra don't vary significantly by isotope - even with deuterium the difference is fractions of a nanometer of wavelength, which is not something detectable in astronomical spectra.
Yes, authors of articles rarely get to choose the headline, at most, they can suggest one. The editors choose the headline and often their motivation is to maximize clicks.
Ars Technica in particular sometimes uses A/B testing, randomly giving readers one of two headlines to see which one generates more clickthroughs (they've been transparent about that, there was an article describing it).
Hello! Author here (for real). Yes I didn't have much say in the headline but I'm fine with it, it's technically what the authors of the paper I covered were saying.
And thanks, hope you enjoyed the article! Regardless of whether this result stands up to scrutiny, I think this was a nice jumping off point to explain Pop III stars, and some of the interesting work JWST is doing here that people are probably not aware of (eg the programs mentioned at the end of the article).
> "First Stars" or what we call "Pop. III" Stars. By definition, the first stars are nearly completely devoid of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
I thought Pop III stars initially formed with only Hydrogen and Helium, but they promptly created heavier elements up to Iron within themselves through fusion.
Indeed, but we define their "metallicity" (mass fraction of elements heaver than helium) typically by the gas that they formed from. And the key point is that since they form from metal-free gas, you don't expect to see emission lines from metals which come from the star illuminating the surrounding gas with radiation.
It makes sense to me that these stars would lack planets, and metallic gases around them and whatnot. But wouldn't you still get metal emission lines from the star itself? Or can those emissions not escape the star because the heavier elements are deep inside it?
> the star illuminating the surrounding gas with radiation
to mean that we're looking at the spectra of the gas around the star, or at best the corona or maybe the surface of the star. I think it's very difficult for photons in the core of a star to reach the surface, so we probably don't see light from the heavier interior elements often or at all.
Inside the star, or even on the surface, there is a lot of energy, so you won't see the light that specifically comes from a single electron, in the first excited state with a well defined energy, that then decays to the ground state.
They create most of the heavier stuff when they blow up. But that's a pretty small fraction of their lifetime, even for stars with a relatively short lifetime (a supernova takes minutes, these things live for millions of years).
Agreed, thanks for saying this. I'm also another astronomer by trade and I'm very surprised that Quanta ran with this title. I like the work that Xin Wang has done, and I'm usually a fan of Quanta Magazine reporting and Simons Foundation work -- I'm currently organizing a conference at the Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics -- but this is really lowering the bar for science journalism.!
This isn't literally an observation of a single star at that distance is it? If they only lasted a few million years then it will be unlikely to see a cluster of them devoid of other 2nd generation stars. It's doubtful (to me) that they all formed at the same time so as to not co-exist with other types.
You’re saying a lot of things here, but is one of them that an event could be detected far away because it’s old, or because it’s such a rare event that the chances it happens near us are vanishingly small?
These systems are very far away because you are looking more than 13 billion years back in time. The argument is JWST has a small field of view and these Pop III stars are like flashes in comparison to the age of the galaxy. So the probability of catching one that is bright enough to be detected is just super low. Which is why there is a strong prior that the HeII could be from other physics that is relatively well understood. But really the OIII emission is the biggest sign that this isn't a "primordial galaxy"
Pop 3 stars were formed in the very early universe and have been long gone. So there is no way for us to see the light they emitted without looking at the most distant galaxies.
Why do the populations seem backwards? You'd think the first stars would be Pop. I, then the next Pop. II, then III, and maybe someday we'd get to IV. Instead they seem to work backwards?
Because the names were determined by when they found those groups of stars, rather than when the stars they found were formed. They only later realized that their distinct groupings based on observed metal content were caused by stellar formation processes.
Regrettably, the stars didn't show up in their telescopes with labels and histories attached.
Same problem with categorizing star luminosity... I wish we could make a shift to these cumbersome categories, but cultural inertia is tough to overcome
If we take the eventual heat death of the universe to be at about 10^100 years, the era we are in with stars and so on only lasts about 10^14 years. Which means light and stars and galaxies are actually just a tiny tiny blip at the start of the lifespan of the universe. Nearly all of the life of the universe will be dark with no stars, just black holes and dark distintegrating rocks and isolated particles.
This sort of thing always fascinates me. This is all true and it absolutely does not matter.
The thought of the universe sitting essentially idle for 10^86 years seems like it should feel wasteful. But why? Wasting what? Does our consciousness imbue the universe with any special quality?
It's all so weird. Even some of our most fantastical science fiction only projects out a few millennia.
Star Trek gets to the 31st century (or 3000s). Foundation is at least 12,000 years in the future. Dune takes place from about 23,000 to about 28,000. Warhammer 40k gets its name from the fact it takes place in the 40,000s. The Time Machine reaches to the 800,000s for the majority of its action. Red Dwarf is set the furthest at 3,000,000-ish.
All of which fall way short of even 1 billion years. The Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies aren't scheduled to meet up for another 5 billion.
Not to give any special credence to Scott Adam's theory that we are actually a simulation and co-incidences are examples of the simulation re-using code, just today youtube fed me a video of @misterwootube discussing 0 ^ 0 in which he incidentally discusses division and multiplication of x^y numbers; for division you subtract and multiplication you add the ^y parts, so the math error was treating the subtraction of the x^y as if it was a division. Mister Woo looks fantastic - I'd never heard of him before; worth a look, youtube.com/@misterwootube
True enough. I honestly did not care enough to do anything but the most cursory attempt at math due to the scale involved. 10^14 years and 10^100 are effectively equal compared to even our entire species current lifespan.
Yeah, it can be boiled down to "there will be stars for longer than you can fathom, then there won't be stars for longer than you can fathom". It's hard to really feel much about different timespans that are all "forever" relative to the entirety of human existence.
Since you mentioned some works of science fiction, this is one thing that is pretty awesome about Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem and how the series encompasses the present and all the way past the end of our universe. It is a really jarring perspective change for us as mortal humans that I think is something that only well thought out science fiction can accomplish.
A great AR art project for the coming years would be to speed up the collision with Andromeda by a factor of a zillion, so that it takes place over a few years.
Ah I see. Viewed from earth. Yeah that would be interesting. The distances between stars are so vast, it might be barely noticeable, the way we can barely see the milky way now.
You can already decrease entropy locally, but net for the entire universe, entropy (as far as we can tell...) always increases monotonically. And any action you take to decrease local entropy still actually increases it in total.
So "The Last Question" is also basically asking - "how can we avoid the heat death of the universe?".
And phrased yet again differently: "Once all the stars burn out and all the uranium is fissioned and the coal burned and the universe is just a homogenous 5 degree kelvin soup of [I'm sure some physicist could tell me whatever fundamental particle it'll be that composes this soup] - what then? Is that just it?"
Once all stars die you will be able to live very long off of the heat of dead stars as they slowly cool off to background temperature.
And once those stars are completely cold, you can start converting their mass into energy by dropping them into black holes, piece by piece.
And once you dropped all matter you could into black holes you could live off merging black holes.
And once you merged black holes you could live off of the black hole radiation until all black holes evaporate.
But this would be if the Universe wasn't expanding at a growing rate. If the Universe is truly expanding at an ever accelerating pace there will come a Big Rip which will cause every fundamental particle to get further from all other particles at speeds faster than light. And then matter as we know it will cease to exist.
> While objects within space cannot travel faster than light, this limitation does not apply to the effects of changes in the metric itself. Objects that recede beyond the cosmic event horizon will eventually become unobservable, as no new light from them will be capable of overcoming the universe's expansion, limiting the size of our observable universe.
We can already observe this phenomenon happening at large scale. Our observable universe shrinks as galaxies effectively accelerate away from us faster than the speed of light (i.e. the space between us and them expands faster than the speed of light). Whether this phenomenon is inevitable at a local scale, especially an atomic scale, is unclear, AFAIU. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip But inprinciple, IIUC, our own bodies are experiencing this effect right now. For now it's beyond miniscule, but slowly accelerating. This tiny local expansion and acceleration, summed over cosmic scales, is ostensibly how galaxies far enough apart can move away from each other faster than the speed of light. Fundamentally it's the continuation of the Big Bang.
It is just a mental shortcut. Of course, things cannot be moving faster than light because speed addition cannot lead to relative speeds faster than light.
What you will see is a slowing, red-shifting, darkening image of everything else as it speeds away from you asymptotically reaching speed of light until space between any two particles starts expanding so fast that no radiation can reach anything anymore and each particle forever lives in its own universe.
Of course we don't know that because we really don't understand how the universe is built and this is just our faulty formulas extrapolated way more than we can reasonably support with our experimental data.
The relevant quantity is "Boltzmann entropy", which is just the relationship between macroscopic observables and microscopic states such that entropy is lower when the former are very sensitive to the latter.
The entropy of your heart is very low: if we swap a cubic centimetre of heart containing the mitral valve for a cubic centimetre of the wall of the right atrium, you'll very quickly die. The entropy of the air around you is much higher: we can take a cubic centimetre of air from near your left nostril and swap it with a cubic centimetre of air from near your right nostril, and you probably would not notice.
We can repeat this volume-swapping process as a way of comparing entropy in various places and at various scales. For two comparable swaps, the one that causes the greater "damage" is the one with the lower entropy.
The entropy of empty space outside galaxy clusters is enormous: we can swap cubic megaparsecs of that around without making an appreciable difference to any astrophysical observables. The metric expansion of space keeps creating more such space. That's where most of the universe's entropy will be found: new empty space.
The entropy of black holes is also enormous. The "no-hair" condition means that a very short time after we throw things into them, black holes relax into a state where we cannot tell if what was thrown in had high entropy (gas, dust, other black holes) or low entropy (stars, space probes). All that's left for an outside observer of a black hole is (in order of difficulty in measuring) its position, linear and angular momentum, mass, one or more charges like the electric charge, Hawking radiation, and possibly some other radiation (all of which forms its macroscopic observables). A black hole would "hide" whether the 100kg of additional mass it recently gained was an astronaut or a blob of atomic hydrogen. A large black hole does not tell us how many black holes fell into it in the past, nor what their masses, momenta, or charges may have been. Its macroscopic observables are tremendously insensitive to its microscopic state. Black holes therefore have very high entropy.
So as black holes form, collide, and grow hierarchically, global entropy also increases over time.
> homogenous 5 degree kelvin soup
The metric expansion of space dilutes all matter. On current trends the energy density at every point will tend towards zero in the far future, and in the very far future will be dominated by radiation originating near the cosmic horizon through a process comparable to Hawking radiation.
Measuring temperature is tricky, but if we use some sort of thermometer made of ordinary matter which gets warmed up by electromagnetic radiation then gently floating in deep extragalactic space that thermometer would report about 2.7 kelvins, mostly driven by interactions with the cosmic microwave background. The reported temperature will drop over time, falling to less than 1 kelvin in about a hundred billion years and to yoctokelvins in about a trillion years. At about the trillion-years-from-now mark, on current trends, the cosmic microwave background will be colder than the horizon radiation, so there is a temperature floor for measurements of electromagnetic radiation.
(There are other things one could in principle use to generate a local temperature reading that continues to fall even further into the future).
> whatever fundamental particle it'll be that composes this soup
It's a very thin gas of very-long-wavelength photons.
This is all with the gently-floating-themometer being at rest in the comoving "cosmological" coordinates and consequently seeing the same temperature in every direction. An observer in constant linear motion against those coordinates ("boosted") will see half its sky warmer and the opposite half colder, and an ultraboosted observer could get quite toasty from the warm side of the "dipole anisotropy". Additionally, a strongly accelerated observer may see other particle species during the acceleration ("Unruh radiation").
Finally,
> And any action you take to decrease local entropy still actually increases it in total.
At cosmological scales, the impact of any sort of local structure or organization at the scale of even a large galaxy cluster ("let's keep our Virgo supercluster stuff from falling into black holes") is nearly nothing compared to the entropy generated by the metric expansion of space.
> ... increases monotonically ...
Because empty space continues to expand, and nothing from outside can enter into our Hubble volume.
Finally, sci-fi enthusiasts could think along physical lines like: what if new empty space is only apparently empty (false vacuum decay), what if we can import new matter into our Hubble volume (wormholes to elsewhere/elsewhen), or what if we can cause the universe to recollapse (dark energy as a fifth force that can drive expansion or contraction of space). Any of those might conflict with your "any action you take to decrease local entropy still actually increases it in total" without offending theoretical thermodynamicists.
This is meaningless, nothing about those numbers matters neither does it say anything conclusive about the nature of reality. It's just our best guess right now, and we are very early.
I find this interesting about human nature, that is in the want to believe in something eternal.
Even if current theory about Universe is proven correct, it will most likely have no effect whatsoever on current human lifetimes. But doesn't preclude us from wanting to believe that the universe is eternal and constant, that there will be flashes of life and activity 10^50 years down the line.
I find the reverse interesting - this anti-conventional desire to reduce scary questions to meaningless quantities in order to intellectually one up everyone else.
If this haunts your dreams, consider "The Life of the Cosmos" By Lee Smolin, as antidote. In that book he proposes that each of those black holes has a child universe associated with it, some of which have sets of physical constants that allow for grandchildren.
I refuse to believe that the Universe isn't cyclical, because I believe the Universe has existed forever, otherwise there is no answer to the origin of everything other than something from nothing or God.
I've often wondered whether something and nothing are just concepts that only make sense from the perspective of a subjective observer.
Is `1 + -1` something or nothing? And what is `2 + -2`? Is it something, nothing, or also `1 + -1`? And I could continue like this proving every number you could possibly imagine can exist in some manifestation of nothing.
So perhaps we're just one of the infinite manifestations of nothing. From our subjective perspective we are something, but from the perspective of an objective observer nothing is really happening because all the subjective manifestations equate to nothing.
I have no idea what I'm talking about, but this always made more sense to me than trying to understand why there is something and how long that something existed for. Perhaps it's both.
Amusingly (to me) the third attitude towards this is: "It just is that way. I'm sorry that the answer does not satisfy you, but the universe does not owe you a satifying answer." :)
The universe does not owe an answer. Extrapolating 50 orders of magnitude when we don't even have an airtight model of existing observations is... not something to be confident about. It certainly won't affect my dreams.
But "forever" only makes sense within our universe, since time itself is intrinsically a property of the universe. If the universe exists within something else, "forever" doesn't necessarily mean anything there.
Occam's razor. A perpetual universe is only required to exist - which also happens to be all we can 100% empirically confirm, whereas the other explanations require creating extra complexity such as a birth/creator or before/after.
Even a before/after of "nothing" is still an extra complication that violates the principle. Not that Occam's razor is a law, but given something already as wieldy as everything, it's probably a prudent application.
A perpetual universe has it's own set of very complicated problems, resetting entropy being the largest elephant in the room. Occam's razor is still twisted into nth dimensional shapes no matter what choice you make here.
There are no easy answers, and it's highly likely whatever answer is true is unknownable.
Occam's razor works when the two alternatives are equally likely. In our case, we have the ratio of primordial elements (which is well explained by the big bang) and the cosmic background radiation (which is extremely well explained by the universe coming out of a hot, fiery early stage, within an error of 1/1000th).
I.e., a perpetual universe must explain why in every direction we see a uniform background radiation which looks exactly like it's coming from a hot universe of the past. Occam's razor dictates that the big bang is the simpler (thus preferable) model, given evidences.
If our view of the universe shows an infinitely compressed point of matter expanding, what can coax such expansion? An infinite surround of nothingness. Which must then be contained within what? More matter; endless ripples.
As another commenter posited, a space-time surface that is curved along itself, perpetually. It doesn't negate the big bang, or the great death, rather it relies on these two properties - but exclusively and reductively.
The original comment was regarding a cyclic universe - which I agreed with. Perhaps my use of the term "perpetual", while accurate - was confusing. I don't disagree with the big bang, we've observed it directly.
In the same way that the two-dimensional surface of a sphere has a finite extent, it's possible to imagine spacetime as a 4-dimensional surface in which the time dimension is finite in extent. In this way, "before the beginning" has no meaning in the same way that "north of the north pole" has no meaning.
Well God doesn't really answer the question, then you just have to ask where God came from. I don't have a personal opinion on "eternal universe" vs. "something from nothing", they seem equally impossible and unfathomable.
That feels like kind of a cop out, doesn't it? I mean that works for any question. It's not very satisfying, and for me it's a lot less satisfying than "I don't know".
The nature of the universe is a mystery, replacing "universe" with "god" is just a tautology that doesn't get us anywhere.
IMO, in this context the "God" and the "I don't know" is the same answer: with an addition that the cause of everything is a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, intelligent, personal being, so we at least know something about the first cause. and let call this "thing" "God". but ultimately we don't know the "God" itself, since he's outside of our domain of natural philisophy. so this answer is still "ultimately we don't know".
on the other hand the "i don't know at all" standpoint either does not engage with the "spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, intelligent, personal" qualifications, because we can pretty well conclude these - altough not by scientific enquire but philosophicly -, or just refuse to label it.
so no, universe and God are not the same kind of mysteries: universe is a miraculous field of riddles you can discover with reason, unlike God.
Believing one has a tendency to cause people to fundamentally alter how they live their lives, optimize for an afterlife at the expense of the life they actually have, and then fight wars over the belief that the afterlife is the only one that matters.
As a default state of not knowing, one causes far more material harm in our current reality than the other.
standing on a viewpoint of ca. "the cause of everything is a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, intelligent, personal being" (ie. the pilosophers' God) does not entail the Abrahamic religions' image of God directly, nor an afterlife of humans, nor a right to self defence, nor commission of evangelization nor jihad.
altough I agree with this datapoint. however the parent post's concern was not about majority, but that monotheism causes violence at all, and it causes more damage to material goods than lack of monotheism.
i once disagree that monotheism, which values non-material things more than material ones, neccessarily leads to destruction of the material. orthodox Christianity for example values material and non-material, soul and body equally.
secondly i disagree that this argument is valid. since if you are in the viewpoint of "all that matters is the non-material" then wasting material does not harm the world. and simirarly, supposedly saving souls at the expense of the body is incomprehensible to the materialist. so the term "harm" understood in 2 disjunct ways per the 2 frameworks.
circling back to orthodoxy: it unites the "saving souls" and "saving forests" (understand well, it's not about trees, but the whole material creation clamped together in a catchphrase) attitudes in the mystery of Incarnation.
Depends. Is the god eternal? Things that are eternal (at least, eternal into the past) don't have beginnings, and therefore don't need creators. (Same with an eternal, cyclical universe - no creator required. It just is, and always has been.)
>Depends. Is the god eternal? Things that are eternal (at least, eternal into the past) don't have beginnings, and therefore don't need creators. (Same with an eternal, cyclical universe - no creator required. It just is, and always has been.)
I'd add that if "god" is/was/will be made entirely of photons (and/or other massless particles), then "god" moves at the speed of light, which means "god" doesn't experience the passage of time[0]; so no beginning, no end and no in-between, just existence outside of "time."
This is, of course, a ridiculous idea. However, it does support the fantasy of an eternal being.
Then again, "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."[1]
Which isn't to say that such claptrap as I suggest is true and, based on what we know now, it seems (at least to me) a ridiculous concept.
That said, our understanding of the universe(s) is woefully incomplete.
... okay, the whole point is that the same excuse can be used for a necessary universe, one that came into existence and was its own first cause, unmoved mover
okay but if the universe is the first cause and the universe is material (matter, energy, etc, everything "measurable"), then where the non-material things come from? purpose, logic, natural laws
they come from human perception being limited to that which is useful for survival. purpose and logic are ways humans try to understand and be able to predict outcomes. natural laws are merely the human description of its perception of the intrinsic mechanics of the universe. none of these things, purpose, logic, or natural laws, is prescriptive for the universe, they're descriptive
will, intellect, truth values, causality, logical principals, about-ness, universales. are these, are everything concievable just emergent properties in your view? are not they real apart from material things?
Because people like the mental comfort of knowing their lives have meaning as foundation blocks in some eternal building. To hear that it all ultimately doesn't matter is not something most people are prepared to accept. The answer to me is simple: live as if it does matter and don't fret about the 'but what if it doesn't' question, anything you'd do different because of that you are likely better off without.
well, strictly philosophically speaking, does not neccessarily have to be an answer there. it's just some answers are more plausible than others. so if there is an answer then you may find it around the more plausible one.
Saying "Saying there’s no answer is no different than replying with “God” as an answer" is no different than have not been looking into the argument even for a second.
Edit: looking through your other comments, I maybe misunderstood your statement here. first glance it very much sounded like the god-of-the-gaps argument to me.
It talks extensively about "He II", the astrophysics notation for singly-ionized helium (a helium atom with one electron removed; He+). That isn't notation for a helium isotope. I can't see anything in the paper mentioning isotopes, nuclear reactions, or anything in that direction. (?)
2He is not being observed, as it is not a bound nucleus.
And this is a good thing! If 2He were bound, the pp fusion reaction would be much faster, our Sun would long since have burned out, and we would not be here.
I know this is probably a silly question but what is the significance of locating earlier and earlier star formations versus other objects? Is it because that's what we can readily identify and improve accuracy of identifying?
Without those stars, we wouldn't have most of the elements we have today. But these stars no longer exist, so we have to look really far back. It's an important question!
First generation stars are so massive, couldn’t there be vast numbers of planets in habitable zones orbiting one? Seems good for a sci-fi setting with feasible interplanetary travel and trade amongst many different worlds.
Unfortunately not. These stars have no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium so you wouldn't be able to create a rocky planet that's habitable. Furthermore their lifetimes are only 3 Myr which is much to short to form a rocky planet and also the explosion from SN if it happens or direct collapse of the star to a black hole would immediately destroy any life.
Set it in Universe N+1 of a multiverse and mix in a tiny dusting of metals and such from Universe N.
Or maybe it’s a synthetic population III star, made for unknown purposes by a now-vanished civilization. You’re allowed to make up whatever you need to get the story going.
Yea, but science fiction seems cooler when a story uses some plausible setting. In any case, another alternative is just to have a large planet with habitable moons in its orbit. Perhaps the planet itself is dead and too hostile for life, and the residents of the moons travel around it to get to civilizations on other moons.
interstellar travel is so pasky, irritating and slow. A civilized culture might well cultivate such systems so that they could have a huge number of worlds in easy range of each other.
Allow them those abilities and you might as well be importing already inhabited worlds from wherever you like, which saves time.
Astronomers Say They Have Spotted
the Universe’s First Stars
Isn't the size of the universe potentially infinite?
If that is the case, we can see only an infinite small fraction of the stars in the universe. Under that assumption, I find it hard to have a concept of what spotting the universe's first stars could mean.
If I've understood the lectures correctly, time isn't really well-ordered, and on scales like this the deviation makes a substantial difference.
However, what we are looking at in cases like this is stars far enough away that the light took most of the age of the universe to reach us, so it's not unreasonable to call those stars (members of the set of) "the Universe’s First Stars".
What does size of the universe have to do with this? ;)
The question is about the relationship between the age of the universe (well, after the big bang) and stars that came into existence afterwards. We have a pretty good idea how old the universe is, and with the universe expanding, light from the early days of the universe still makes it to earth from billions of light-years away.
You could postulate that we arised from A Big Bang rather than The Big Bang, and somewhere outside the visible universe some alien species watched it happen. At least as I understand things, nothing we know about the visible universe puts any constraints, age or otherwise, on the rest of it.
But for similar reasons, unless some fundamental understanding of time and space changes, nothing outside the visible universe really matters.
