If a planet was 5 million light years away from earth, the James Webb from earth would see it as it was 5 million years ago.
And say if we continued to watch this planet from the earth we would see events happening at the same speed on earth.
if I was to fly towards this planet in a space ship with a telescope, would I see events on the planet being sped up and if I was to fly away would events happen in slow motion?
In: Physics
No, because the speed of light isn’t actually just the speed of light, it’s the speed of causality.
Imagine you have a book whose words are printed immediately as you turn the page. Pretend you can’t flip the page until you are done reading.
The words are information or matter/energy. The pages are the observable universe. Flipping the page is the amount of time it takes for light/information to travel.
You can’t read the book faster than you can flip the page, because (to simplify/ignore the quirks of quantum physics) information cannot be obtained faster than the speed of light.
Observable phenomena rely on light to be observable. The speed of light is basically the speed of information, and is finite. Tying back to the analogy: you can’t read the book faster than you can flip the pages.
To add to this: nothing in the universe is still. This is where relativity comes in to play. Your speed is relative to your frame of reference. We are constantly moving at tremendous speeds— towards and away— from observable celestial bodies/groups. Do we still see things that appear to be happening faster than they should? No, we see them happening in “real-time” with the limit always being the speed of light itself.
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