Pristine relics of the Big Bang spotted

[Crazy Eddie]

A couple questions for the local physics gurus:

First, given these two clouds came to exist "about two billion years" after the big bang, according to the article. The clouds' distance is given at being about 11 billion light years away. Obviously, this means that for the first two billion years the universe had expanded at a speed significantly faster than the speed of light; that is, it expanded fast enough that the atoms and molecules that eventually became me were propelled away from that cloud fast enough that the light from that cloud is only now reaching my eyeballs.

So
Question 1: How "big" was the universe when those clouds actually formed
Question 2: How far away are those clouds NOW?
Question 3: More complicated... if I understand the physics correctly, the clouds formed because the local influence of gravity overcame the expansive influence of whatever-the-hell caused the big bang. If that influence was sufficient to collapse huge chunks of materials into gas clouds (and the more distant quasars behind them) why was it NOT sufficient to overcome the expansive force that eventually scattered those clumps in all directions?

I've heard question 3 sometimes answered that the "expansive force" is owed to dark energy and apparently decreased sharply after the big bang and then started increasing again for some reason.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And why is Andromeda an exception moving towards the Milky Way?

Galaxies aren't really rushing away from each other per se. The space between them is expanding; thus, the more space between two galaxies, the faster they appear to be moving away from each other. But on a more local scale, galaxy movement is not so dramatic.

As you blow up a balloon, the atoms in the rubber on one side rush away from the atoms in the rubber on the other side of it. But a collection of atoms right next to each other will still interact in fairly random ways, bouncing off each other etc.

The baloon analogy produced an image in my head that made me wonder about something.

General Relativity--which applies at larger/cosmic distances--allows, I believe, for a curved space-time. That curvature accounts for gravitational interaction, the curved trajectory of a particle passing through a gravitational field, not to mention gravitational redshift.

If you're conceding that the universe is a "balloon" anyway, then isn't the EXPANSION of the balloon redundant? After all, this inherently presupposes a curved (spherical) structure of the universe that would result in a significant redshift even if the universe ISN'T expanding. What's more, the curvature of the sphere would result in a non-linear (increasing) redshift as a function of distance. IOW, a spherical universe would LOOK like its expanding outwards to an observer on any particular point in it, for the same reason a person standing on a planet appears to be on the top of a convex dome (if he has a big enough telescope, everywhere he looks, he sees the ground gradually curve away from him and angle down below the horizon).

Just a thought.