So I heard that, possibly, two super massive black holes could be merging by the end of this or next year. My question is this, and essentially trying to get my head around, if it takes x amount of time for light to reach us, has this event already happened? And we are just seeing it in its past?
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So im late to this one but I figure I’ll add my bit all the same.
The answer is both yes and no. Yes, because you are exactly right about light and time over distance.
No because of relativity. If you and I both have clocks set to the exact same time but I fly off into space on a rocket at near the speed of light for a year and return. Our clocks will be dramatically different. Yours will have advanced much more than my own. If while we carried out this experiment while noting the time at which significant events occured we would report different times that they occured, neither of us would be wrong since the time would be relative to our own perspective. For this reason saying an event has already happened isn’t quite true. This is because we often describe these events as occuring “relative to our own reference frame”
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