system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is the "observable universe" limited by our current telescopic technology, or can we see that far and there's nothing behind it?
gpt
When we look farther away, we're looking farther back in time. If we look far enough, we're looking at a time when the universe was much hotter and denser. Beyond a certain point, the universe was so hot and dense that it was full of ionized plasma, and light couldn't propagate. The plasma cooled and formed hyrogen about 400,000 years after the big bang, and that is the farthest we can see (which appears as the cosmic microwave background). If we can drastically improve our neutrino detection capabilities we could see farther back, because neutrinos travel unimpeded through basically everything.