how can modern telescopes see objects million lightyears away?

Question

We often hear from many reports that the scientist has found object million light years away. How's that possible while we all know that the telescope itself has just been 1 to 5 years old. Is the speed of telescope sight range faster than the speed of light?

Answer 1

You seem confused about what a telescope does. A telescope simply picks up light arriving from space. Those galaxies millions of light years away have been emitting light that has been arriving on this planet continuously since this planet was formed. A telescope doesn't have to send anything out to pick up the light; it just acts like a bucket under a leaking roof and starts collecting light as soon as it is used, wherever that light comes from.

Answer 2

Light itself has a fixed speed - just over 186,000 miles per second.

If an object was that far away it would take 1 second for the light to get to us - we would see it 1 second old.

If you moved this object so light took one year to get to us this would be a distance of 1 light year.
If someone then flashed a torch at us we would not see this until 1 year later.
If you get a good telescope that can gather very faint light then its possible to see light that has taken millions of years to reach us - you need a very sensitive telescope to gather the weak light and the sensor is often cooled with liquid helium so it is very sensitive.
Given time and computers to improve the image you get to see the results of galaxies and stars millions of years ago.

Answer 3

Oh my god I got a headache just reading this question!!!

The telescope does not send out magic rays that "sense" the distant object. The distant object emits light (and other radiations) that, although they originated millions of years ago, are just now reaching the earth. That light is captured by the telescope to allow us to see these distant objects.

Answer 4

The age of the telescope is irrelevant. Telescopes are passive receivers: they just take in the light which was emitted by the object millions of years ago.

Answer 5

Stars and other luminous stellar objects send out light which eventually reaches the earth--sometimes after a very long time. The light comes to the earth whether we are looking at it or not.

The telescope just receives the light that comes to it. No mystery to that.

Answer 6

No, it's the light coming from the object that goes to the telescope, not the opposite..

Answer 7

This takes a bit of getting used to in your mind. Check this out...

Light from the Moon takes about 1/4 second to reach the Earth. (Distance of 240,000 Miles)

Light from the Sun takes 8 Minutes to reach the Earth. (Distance of 93,000,000 Miles).

So, the farther away an object is, the longer it takes for light from it to reach the Earth.

If an object were 6 Trillion Miles away from Earth, light from it would take one Year to reach the Earth. (One Light Year).
And, 60 trillion miles distance would equate to 10 years for light to reach us (10 Light Years). Etc., Etc. You can do the math and come up with some really big numbers...

Which leads us to understand that the Universe is really BIG.

Answer 8

The objects astronomers see in the sky that are millions of light years away is the light it was giving of millions of years ago so its sorta like looking in the past, for example if scientists are viewing a star that is 2 million light years away they are actually seeing what that star was like 2 million years ago because it takes that long for the light to travel to earth so we can see it

Answer 9

nothing is faster than the speed of light. the telescopes they use might be a year old or so, but it might be very powerful.