The Glow From the Beginning

Among all the starlight reaching you tonight, the oldest is something you cannot quite see — a faint, even glow coming from every direction at once, the same wherever you look. It is the afterglow of the beginning: light set loose when the universe was young, stretched and cooled across nearly fourteen billion years of travel until it slipped out of sight into faint microwaves.

It is genuinely everywhere, passing through you right now. For decades it even leaked into living rooms — a sliver of the static fuzz on an old untuned television was this ancient light, the oldest signal in existence, mistaken for noise.

This glow is the farthest back we can ever see: a wall of light from when the cosmos was only a few hundred thousand years old. Beyond it there is nothing to see, because there was no light yet to leave.

And if this is the oldest light of all — what was happening the moment it was set free?