When we look at the stars, we time travel.
Thousands of stories etch the dark night sky. Each one different from the last. Time travel in it’s finest but how far are we looking back?
As a kid I always thought stars were tiny specks spread over the night sky. I didn’t think much about it then but I slowly learned to appreciate the magnificence of these spectacular creations of the Cosmos.
Each star is a gigantic ball of gas much much hotter and larger than our sun far far away, and yet we see those shiny specks glittering and shimmering with every passing night.
Each star tells it’s own story, a tale as old as time itself. All those stories from far across the universe are presented to you on a platter just before supper.
Light is fast. When I say light’s fast, I really mean it.
Light can travel a staggering 186,282 miles in a single second.
One second. Boom. 186,282 miles. Just like that. Another second. Boom. Another 186,282 miles. By the time you finish this article, light would have travelled an impressive 33,480,000 miles!
What’s a star? Long story short, a star is an insane amount of light. When you look at a star, what you’re actually seeing is the light that the star in question had emitted when it left it’s surface.
The same can be said for the sunlight reaching us every morning.
Because it takes 8 minutes for light to leave the Suns’ surface and reach Earth, what we’re looking at when we look at the sun is actually the Sun 8 minutes in the past.
We can never truly look at the sun in the present, or even observe it from the Earth exactly as it is in the current moment because we need to give light those entire 8 minutes to make it’s journey.
If the Sun were to (hypothetically, of course) vanish, then we wouldn’t know until 8 minutes have elapsed beacuse what we’re looking at is the Sun 8 minutes in the past. Try wrapping your head around that.
The closest star to our solar system is a star called Proxima Centauri. This star is a crazy 5.88 trillion miles away from us and takes light 4.3 years to exit the surface of Proxima Centauri and reach the surface of planet Earth aka 4.3 Light years. When we look at Proxima Centauri, what we’re looking at is the star 4.3 years in the past.
Just like Proxima Centauri, all the stars you see in the blanket of the night are actually stars from the past. Stars that took a very very long time to get here.
If a very distant star, let’s say 160,000 light years away were to explode at this very moment, we wouldn’t know about it for another 160,000 years.
A big telescope helps you look even farther into space. If you look at a star 12 billion light years away from Earth using a telescope big enough, such as Quasar APM 08279+5255 you are looking back 12 billion years into the past.
To put that into perspective, the universe itself is 13.8 billion years old.
You’re looking across the making of the universe, countless planets, asteroids, black holes, the creation and destruction of stars and planets and moons with just a single glance.
You are part of it, a vital part in the entire cosmic play in the vastness of space and time. You were here. Living proof of something so beautiful, magnificent and astounding. All of us are. We are all stardust. Living remnants of the Universe, the mother of us all.
