I don’t really understand it, could someone explain in basic terms?
Are we saying if a star is 120 million lightyears away, light from the star would take 120 million years to reach us? Meaning from the pov of time on earth, the light left the star when the earth was still in its Cretaceous period?
In: 292
Have you ever seen a lightning strike in a distance. It takes some time for the thunder to reach you. The sound you hear once it does was created the moment you saw the lightning strike, even though you heard it just now. Same way it takes time for the sound to reach you, it also takes time for the light.
Every object you see appears to you in the way it was at the moment the light was emitted or reflected off of it.
From the moon, it takes light 1,3 seconds. So in a way your seeing the moon as it was 1,3 seconds ago. The moon is 1,3 “light seconds” away.
The light from sun takes about 8 minutes to reach us, so if it died out suddenly, we would only know about it 8 minutes after it already happened. The sun is 8 “light minutes” away.
If we looked 13.8 billion light years into the distance, we would theoretically see the Big Bang that created this universe as if it was happening right now, even though the universe has been around for 13.8 billion years
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