Its been said that when you look up at the sky and see the stars...?

Question

you are actually looking back in time...someone explain this to me where my brain can process it. I know it takes light millions of years to reach us, traveling over so many miles, but i just cant grasp the thought.

Answer 1

The easiest way to process the information that light from a distant star left that star many years ago is to go to a baseball game. Sit in the bleachers in the outfield, and use binoculars to watch the batter. He or she swings and hits the ball. Because you are 300 or more feet away it takes almost 1/4 second for the sound to get to you. You see the bat hit the ball and 1/4 second later (let's say) you hear the contact. Substitute starlight for the crack of the bat hitting the ball, and light years rather than feet, and you will grasp the concept.

Answer 2

First, you have to understand how our eye works. When light reaches our eye by reflecting from any object, our eye produces image o that object in our mind. That's how all of us see. The same process works when the light is coming from a source of light, say, a star. So, if the star is 1 million light years away from us, its rays will come to us in 1 million years. So, today when we see the star, the rays that started 1 million years earlier reach our eyes. So, our eyes construct the image of what the star looked like a million years ago.

Answer 3

We are "looking into the past" in the sense that we are seeing light from stars as they existed long ago. You can just as easily say that doesn't really give you a view of the past, because what you are actually seeing is an image in the present.

All the answers above about the workings of the eye and so on are hogwash, and a couple of them are much worse than that.

Answer 4

As you said it “it takes light millions of years to reach us” so we are looking at a star from millions of years ago
Imagine you live in LA and receive New York Times by snail mail. You read newspaper which few days old. New York changed a bit in this few days but you don’t know about it yet. The information you receive is allways old(not current)

Answer 5

The starlight that you see tonight enters your eye now but may have started its trip at least four light years ago from the nearest star. If the star explodes today, it will take at least four years for us to see the light from the explosion. Because the universe expanded rapidly following the Big Bang, light from tthe other side is still reaching us from billions of years ago and can be seen only with powerful telescopes. Anything that happened long ago is history and all starlight is history too.

Answer 6

let me give you an example from something you know - lightning, you know that it takes some time between the light and the thunder, that is because the light moves very fast but the sound is slower, so when you hear the thunder you hear something that was in the past.
now the same thing happens with light from distant stars, when it reaches your eyes it has been traveling for years, maybe hundreds or thousands of years, so what you see is the light from the past.

Answer 7

It takes a while for the light from the stars to be reflected back to the earth. I have heard that most stars we actually see are no longer in existance that they have burned up or moved position. however, i don't really know much about astrology, so I really can't answer your question properly.

Answer 8

look at the light in your room when you turn it on it ,takes time for you to see it as well, you have to pull back and look at the big pitcher. when you turn on the light you say the big bang from you to the light is the past you looking at when you tune it on. you are looking back in time. its big er out in space. that's all .time and space look at NASA pitchers on line

Answer 9

Some things are just incomprehensible................