Astronomers claim to have visualised a galaxy at a distance of 13 billion lightyears, using an optical trick. The light from the galaxies started travelling 13 billion years ago, only 500 million years after the Big Bang, the phenomenon that started the Universe and Time. An in-depth article can be read here.
For reference, 1 lightyears equates to the distance travelled by light within a vacuum within one earth year. In metres, this is 9.4605284 × 10^15 meters. Written out without the exponentials, this reads as 9,460,528,400,000,000. Multiply that by 13,000,000,000, and you get something like 123 * 10^24. Which looks like 123,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Care to walk that for your constitutional?
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No thanks Guido....I would rather 'visualiise it'. Lol!
ReplyDeleteThis opens up so many avenues of ponderables..and what ifs... and could that be.... and is that why...and where is now, and what is really here and there?
Then I remember...we humans devised the concept of time.....
'Had we but world enough and time'.....(to steal a line from Andrew Marvell's well known poem and use it out of context) I would love to study astronomy and galactic distances etc....I find it fascinating. I shall have to come back again in another life. Jeanie
I get overwhelmed when I think of this. How do they do it?? Amazing isn't it?
ReplyDeletePam