MicroFactzzz#0016 · 🌌 Cosmic Oddities
When You Look at the Night Sky, You're Watching the Past — Literally
Light from distant stars and galaxies takes years, millennia, or billions of years to reach us, so we see them as they were long ago.
Even the sunlight you see right now left the Sun's surface over 8 minutes ago — that's how long the trip to Earth takes.
For stars and galaxies, that delay grows to absurd proportions. The Andromeda Galaxy, visible to the naked eye, reaches us as light that's 2.5 million years old.
The most distant objects observed by telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope show light sent out more than 13 billion years ago — practically since the dawn of the universe.
The upshot: a telescope pointed deep into space is also a time machine — the farther out you look, the further back in time you go.
Sources
- General knowledge / encyclopedic sources
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Krulicza Nora
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