As you know light travels at a very fast but finite speed, which means this image above that you are looking at is of galaxies and structures as they were billions of years ago, there maybe no similar galaxies in the present universe to the ones in the picture. This is lucky for us, because if can see only the present universe then our understanding of how it evolves will be limited, I’ll explain this with the example that motivated me to write this post:

Imagine that the only humans you saw were adults, you never see babies, then you would not be able to understand how humans develop from babies to adults you would have no idea! That’s why we are lucky that when we look far away we can see the baby universe. The picture above is a teenage universe, the picture below illustrates how the universe looks different the farther away you look.

If you look far enough you will see an get to an era before planets and starts and galaxies form, an era were everything was packed so close together that the universe was a soup of positive and negative charges (called a plasma).

It is amazing that we used to be this soup and now we are humans using the internet, the universe has been through a lot!!