People are saying that The Pillars Of Creation have been destroyed, and will take 400-500 Million light years to reach us. Can someone explain how do we know it when the light hasn’t reached us?
In: 1444
Strictly speaking we can’t know for sure. We can look at what was going on 6500 years ago (when the light that we see now was first emitted and/or reflected from the objects), and we can make some educated guesses as to what has *probably* happened since then, given what we know about astronomy. According to our current theories, the Pillars “should” be gone by now: it’s not so much that they’ve been destroyed as that they’re in a transitional phase as one type of matter turns into another, and that process is likely to continue.
That said, 6500 years is a long time. It is possible something happened that we can’t currently anticipate. It’s also possible that there’s an error in our theories about how a structure like this would evolve over time. But if we assume neither of these is the case, then at least to the best of our current knowledge, the structure we now call the Pillars of Creation is *probably* gone, or at least changed into a form that we wouldn’t recognize as being the same thing.
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