How many light-years away can we go?

So the furthest out we can see is about 46.5 billion light years away, which is crazy, but it also means you can look back into the past and try to figure out how the universe formed, which again, is what cosmologists do.
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How many light years can we go?

The light that travels the longest gets stretched by the greatest amount, and the object that emitted that light is now at a greater distance because the universe is expanding. We can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away precisely because of the expanding universe.
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Can we see 90 billion light years away?

We can currently see objects 46 billion light years away but we see them as they were in the distant past. We will never see the light from objects that are currently more than 15 billion light years away, because the universe is still expanding.
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Why can't we see 15 billion light years away?

Answer and Explanation: Because the universe is estimated to be less than 14 billion years old, conventional wisdom would indicate that we can't see a galaxy 15 billion light-years away because, if anything exists 15 billion light-years away at all, its light hasn't had enough time to reach us.
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How far can we look back in time?

The improved resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope increased the lookback time to 13.4 billion years, and with the JWST we expect to improve on this possibly to 13.55 billion years for galaxies and stars. Stars started to form a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, in a time that we call the cosmic dawn.
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Light seconds, light years, light centuries: How to measure extreme distances - Yuan-Sen Ting



Can you technically go back in time?

Although humans can't hop into a time machine and go back in time, we do know that clocks on airplanes and satellites travel at a different speed than those on Earth. We all travel in time!
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Are stars we see already gone?

Because stars are so far away, it takes years for their light to reach us. Therefore, when you look at a star, you are actually seeing what it looked like years ago. It is entirely possible that some of the stars you see tonight do not actually exist anymore. Public Domain Image, source: NASA.
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How long would 1000 light years take?

To do so, you will need a speed of almost the speed of light, so in the reference frame of Earth, you will have spent just a tad more that 1000 yr to travel 1000 ly. i.e. 1000 years, 4 hours, and 23 minutes in Earth's reference frame.
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How long would it take to travel 100 trillion light years?

Some galaxies will have fallen over the cosmic horizon, where no amount of time would ever let you reach them. If you wanted to travel 100 trillion light years away, you could make the journey in 62 years.
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Can we look into past light years?

Strictly speaking, when telescopes look at the light from distant galaxies, they are not literally looking back in time. The past no longer exists, so no one can directly look at it.
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How long would it take to travel 500 light years?

The light travels at the speed of 1 light year. Therefore, if we assume light to be travelling, then it will travel 500 light years in 500 years.
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How far back can we look in the universe?

So the furthest out we can see is about 46.5 billion light years away, which is crazy, but it also means you can look back into the past and try to figure out how the universe formed, which again, is what cosmologists do.
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What is bigger than universe?

No, the universe contains all solar systems, and galaxies. Our Sun is just one star among the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and the universe is made up of all the galaxies – billions of them.
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Why is space infinite?

There's a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn't existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding).
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How long will it take to travel 1 light-year?

Light-year is the distance light travels in one year. Light zips through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second and 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers) per year.
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How can we look back in time?

Because light takes time to travel from one place to another, we see objects not as they are now but as they were at the time when they released the light that has traveled across the universe to us. Astronomers can therefore look farther back through time by studying progressively more-distant objects.
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Can we travel 600 light years?

Since one light year is the equivalent nearly six trillion miles, it would take 22 million years to travel 600 light years on a space shuttle and visit Kepler 22-b with our current technology.
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How can you see 10 billion light years?

It's because the space between any two points — like us and the object we're observing — expands with time. The farthest object we've ever seen has had its light travel towards us for 13.4 billion years; we're seeing it as it was just 407 million years after the Big Bang, or 3% of the Universe's present age.
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Is a light-year 9.5 trillion hours?

In a vacuum, light travels at 670,616,629 mph (1,079,252,849 km/h). To find the distance of a light-year, you multiply this speed by the number of hours in a year (8,766). The result: One light-year equals 5,878,625,370,000 miles (9.5 trillion km).
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What is the closest black hole to Earth?

This dormant black hole is about 10 times more massive than the sun and is located about 1,600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, making it three times closer to Earth than the previous record holder.
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How long would it take to go 4.25 light-years?

Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years from Earth, a distance that would take about 6,300 years to travel using current technology. Such a trip would take many generations.
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How many stars that we see are dead?

Using our knowledge of the death rate in the entire Milky Way, the death rate for visible stars works out at about one star every 10,000 years or so. Given that all those stars are closer than 4,000 light-years, it is unlikely – though not impossible – that any of them are already dead.
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Will Earth eventually become a star?

No. In order for a star to sustain itself, fusion must take place to avoid collapse due to gravity. The earth is made from heavy elements (nickel, iron, etc) which are nearly impossible to fuse in stars. Therefore, due to this, the Earth cannot be a star due to the addition of more mass.
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Why is the sky blue?

As white light passes through our atmosphere, tiny air molecules cause it to 'scatter'. The scattering caused by these tiny air molecules (known as Rayleigh scattering) increases as the wavelength of light decreases. Violet and blue light have the shortest wavelengths and red light has the longest.
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