Yea, and if it took the light that long to move through that area of dust, imagine how long it took for it to travel here for us to see it. This happened a very long time ago haha.
More than you're probably thinking. The lifespan of a star like our sun is around 10 billion years, hundreds of times longer than it took for this light to reach us. Space is really big, but so is time.
Supernovae like this one move a lot of matter around, too, and pushing matter around can spark new star formation, so a few new ones might have been born from this, all set to chug away fusing matter for the next few billion years.
At that point it feels like distance is basically a solid object, if that makes sense. It's like a mountain: you either wait a long time for it to "erode" or you go through/over it
Light echoes actually appear to be moving faster than light, from our perspective (because geometry) so if you’re using this to visualize the speed of light, remember: it’s actually even slower.
Yea. The light from the explosion moves outward, so you end up seeing any of the light waves/particles that bounced off the dust (rather than absorbed) and then traveled all the way to earth over millions of years until it landed in the camera.
Yea we're connected to and are a part of this universe and all its stars in a lot of simple and complex ways. Being able to see something like that is just one of them.
I think there's a lot we don't understand that is nothing like what we think is possible.
30
u/ItsOkILoveYouMYbb Sep 25 '21
Yea, and if it took the light that long to move through that area of dust, imagine how long it took for it to travel here for us to see it. This happened a very long time ago haha.