We have no observations of BHs at that distance no, why? because its far away. As you correctly point out all we have is smudges, the colours of which imply that we either have BHs or star formation, it will require spectroscopy to determine which is right, which will require a much large telescope then presently available. We do know however from the Magorrian relation that there is a relation between the size of a central BH and the mass of the bulge of a galaxy, this relation may even hold down the globular cluster masses, this strongly implies that we should see some massive BHs associated with regions of stars even that far back.Your suggestion that the disk around the material might emit light is fine, but we don't even have any real evidence that massive sized BH's, complete with disks no less, even exist at this stage do we? It seems to me like we're simply throwing out ideas that happen to be consistent with our theoretical understanding of what we might *expect* to see, rather than basing our opinions on direct observation. If the idea was based on actual observation, we would know the difference between a field of stars and a BH disk of light.
Eurgh, a typical question I get regularly from 9 year olds when talking about the BB. Alright one last try, the BB is NOT and explosion in the conventional sense. There is NO centre to the Universe, everything is not moving away from one point, if there was then we must be at the centre of the Universe which of course we aren't. The galaxies have not moved at all in any real sense, they are still sat on top of exactly the same piece of space, to them it seems as if all other galaxies are moving away, the space between bound structures is expanding. Each galaxy is exactly where it started, it hasn't moved at all, the galaxies aren't really moving, space is expanding, so it looks like they are.How could whole galaxies made of matter get more than 13.7 billion light years from their point of origin?
That would be true if we lived in a Newtonian Universe (Im assuming you meant 27.4Gly), but we don't the Universe has curvature on cosmological scales, and the influence of dark energy. When you do the full calculation, the observable (and not the whole Universe) comoving radius is about 46Gly.If all this is true, then the particles in the universe that are made of mass could not be more than 27.4 light years across. In fact, the physical universe could not be more than 2 Hubble constants wide.
Here is a nice quote from wikipedia on the subject.
So you can see again the trap of thinking in a Newtonian sense, no wonder people have problems with the BB, it requires an understanding of phenomena we simply haven't evolved to comprehend properly.The figures quoted above are distances now (in cosmological time), not distances at the time the light was emitted. For example, the cosmic microwave background radiation that we see right now was emitted about 13.7 billion years ago by matter that has, in the intervening time, condensed into galaxies. Those galaxies are now about 46 billion light-years from us, but at the time the light was emitted, that matter was only about 40 million light-years away from the matter that would eventually become the Earth.
I'll try to sort out some links about observations of the early Universe, and probably put them in another thread, though obviously this wil have to wait till after Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all.