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Astronomer Discovers the Most Distant Stars Ever Observed From Earth
Cryolithic writes to tell us The Vancouver Sun is reporting that a University of B.C. astronomer recently used NASA's Hubble telescope to see a cluster of stars one billion light-years from Earth, the farthest stars ever observed from Earth. From the article: "That's interesting, he explains, because given that light travels at a finite speed -- 300,000 km a second -- the light emitted from the star cluster he and Kalirai saw was emitted one billion years ago. That means the cluster as it appeared to them two months ago was the way it looked one billion years ago. In other words, they were looking one billion years back in time."
"In other words, they were looking one billion years back in time."
So, when I look at the sun, I am actually looking back in time 8 minutes?
Deep.
Ric Romero is submitting articles to Slashdot now?
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I don't get the whole "back in time" thing. Saying it 3 different ways in a 3 sentence blurb isn't quite enough. Is this, like, before the Great Flood? :-)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
In other words, these pictures are one billion years, two months old.
That's like asking "Is it one billion light years from New York or one billion light years from Chicago?"
You kids and your fancy record albums! In my day, it was explained to me that the Sun was the hole in the middle of a gramophone cylinder, and the Earth was the trunk in my room at the orphanage in which I kept my knickerbockers, and the farthest planet Neptune would probably be down by the paper mills where all us kids would look for work. Now get off my lawn!
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For a complete vacuum, it certainly has a lot of stuff in it to look at.
Someone forgot to clean out the filter? My vacuum filter always gets full of gunk after a while...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Oh.my.god. Using those figures, according to my calculations, it takes the light from the sun about eight minutes to reach Earth. That means, we aren't seeing the Sun NOW, we're seeing the sun eight minutes in the PAST. So everything we're seeing, everything with the Sun's light on it, is actually touching the past! I'm.. I'm touching the PAST. Looking through TIME.
these are really good brownies.
From the article:
"Astronomers further said that they had decoded part of a computer signal from the star systems in question, possibly a signal 1,000,000,000 years old! It said, 'Please wait, Java loading.'"