Theoretically if I was 66 million light years away from earth and had a telescope strong enough would I be able to see the dinosaurs if I faced it towards earth and nothing was obstructing my view?
In: Physics
You would have to point it toward where the Earth was 66 million years ago. Here are some extra words that the moderator bot wants me to add. The Earth has moved a lot since it reflected the light from 6 million years ago.
If you were far enough away with a clear view of anything you could witness your own self being born
The Milky Way galaxy [is 100,000 light years side to side](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/a5Hk4VNl3I8/hqdefault.jpg). Ten to a million light years. Your telescope is 660 galaxies away. That’s a long way.
You’re looking for a handful of photons, guessing where Earth was before 66Myears of moving, and trying to ignore the mass of photons from the trillions of stars in the sky.
Worse, trying to point your telescope at the Sun, then angling it *just a tiny amount* so you’re ignoring [all the masses of photons from the Sun](https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1edud3j/i_combined_over_100000_images_of_the_sun_captured/) and only looking at the ones reflecting from Earth, which is right by the Sun. And not even the ones reflecting from the bright ice at the North/South poles, or the clouds, but the ones coming from between the clouds. That’s some high precision pointing.
Yes. Light takes time to travel. The light we see from objects in space left them a long time ago. If you’re 66 million light years away, the light reaching you from Earth left our planet 66 million years ago.
Ok in theory it’s possible, but something must have been obstructing the path of the photons during these 66 million years, making this impossible, am I missing something?
Hell, take a pair of binoculars to Washington D.C. If you point them at the While House you’ll eventually see one emerge.
I’m thinking, photons partly behave like particles. So there is a limited number of them. Surely at a certain distance they are spread so thin that it’s impossible to see objects below a certain size/luminosity no mater how good your telescope is.
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