Speed of Light , Light Year, The Farthest Object ever Photographed (MIND BLOWN!!!!!)
Alright, Incoming are some facts that will make your headspin, well atleast mine did!
Speed of Light Yokohama © Amano Studio
The Basics:
Speed of Light:
Light travels at a speed of 186,000 Miles a second... not Miles per Hour, Miles per second. The circumference of the Earth is roughly 25,000 miles. So Light can travel around the earth close to 7.5 times in a second.
That's fast!
Looney Tunes Image : Road Runner
A Light Year :
Now this is where things start getting freaky.
A light year is the speed of light (186,000 miles a second) traveling for a full year.
That's 365.25 days traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles a second..
That's roughly 6 trillion miles in one light year. Yowza!
quickmeme.com
Now for the grand finale.
nasa.gov
This is a photograph taken by NASA's Hubble Telescope.
It is of a galaxy found in 2009-2010 that is 13.2 BILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY.
SO lets do the math 13.2 Billion (Light years) times 6 trillion miles (equal to miles in one light year)
13200000000 X 6000000000000 = 7920000000000000000000000 MILES! And I thought I was dying the last time I ran one mile.
So needless to say, it took 13.2 Billion Light years for the light from the galaxy to reach the telescope.
So the Galaxy photographed isn't even relevant now. It had its demise before it could even be seen, by us.
We worry about such little things, we think our world will end when we don't get everything our way. We just need to chill out, because we are just a little speck, in a much bigger and greater infinite universe. You may even be able to find yourself out there if you had the means to search.
With all that technology though, to take a picture of an object that was 13.2 billion light years away, you're telling me we don't have technology to check our colons? We still have to have a doctor stick his finger up there??? I call shenanigans on all of that!
wisegeek.com
Haha what are your thoughts on outer space?
Is there another living species out there?
Another Human Species?
Another you?
the nearest star , besides the sun, is ~ 4 light years away...
why haven't they come visit us?
Because not all stars can support life. Reasons they also may like us not have the technology to travel that far either.
Maybe we are old news, maybe we are not of interest.
Maybe, it's the opposite,
Maybe they don't have the technology.
Maybe they have, and we are the descendants of them.
Ha I have no clue, but it's a topic I like to think about often.
Nice post. I find this stuff fascinating.
The fact about light that I love is that it takes 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach earth. It takes years for the light from distant stars to reach earth which means when you look at the night sky your actually looking back in time.
Thank you, yes this stuff is very fascinating to me as well!
I would say there always has been something or someone out there. With more than 13.2 billion light years of space or more there is no way we are simply alone. Might be time that separates us from others or even just space. Will we find them? Who can say there are far more moving objects in space than we will ever know not to mention like old sci-fi flicks what's to say not all of the things out there absolutely need oxegyn to breath. So there could be an infinite amount of things we can learn as we begin to travel through space.
exactly! I find myself speculating on all the "What If's" all the time. I would love if in my lifetime, we as humans found another living intelligent life form, from another planet. It is a long shot, but that'd make me happy.
It is very relevant. It gives us information on the universe history, on physics, etc... There are many pieces of information that we can extract from there.
maybe relevant isn't the best term, how about exists.