With telescopes like Hubble can we ever see distant space in PRESENT time, or just in the distant past due to how long light takes to travel?
Can we ever know what’s happening in present time in distant space? Please elaborate as much as possible on what we can see in distant space in relation to present time versus the past. Thank you!
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answers:
roberto say: you are muddy on the concept of time/space/gravitational exertion in changing both pal.
clocks at 45kFT altitude run a bit FASTER than the brother clock on the ground,,why is that?
gravity sloooooooowwwwwwsssssssss time,the stronger the gravitational field,the more pronounced is this factor,
put yourself on a body a zillion miles out,with gravty,if you could survive with your biology able to tolerate this,,a hundred times more powerful than earths.. spend 6 months in your planets sunny zone,reading,listening to rock,hunting animals,,return to earth in your alcubierre hyperdrive spaceship, 60 years have passed there/here,
all seemed fine while you were up there,watch showed the correct time as usual,,watch w its calendar have advanced 60 years ahead of earth clocks.\
get it?
light reaching us,whether warped & lensed by huge galaxies or galaxy clusters,travels @ 300k/Km/sec,,light reaching us or hubble is OLLLLLD light,,,,the value of NOW,,instantaneous observation is constrained by that velocity
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Dick say: From watching many, many science/space programs I've learned that as far as we can currently determine, we cannot achieve the speed of light with any of the means, known to us, or any that are within the laws of physics as we know them. That, if completely true, would mean that our vision would always be seeing something that just happened (past tense) and not what is happening. If I am standing 1 foot away from you and am looking in your eyes and you blink, then I will always see you blink after it happened, even though there is only 1 foot for the reflected light to travel from your face to my eye. That does not include the time for my retina to sense the image and relay it to my brain. So if it took only 1 billionth of a second for your blink to reach my brain, it's still in the past. So we actually see everything "in the past" if you break it down to even the shortest fraction of time.
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goring say: What we observe is stars that are far away. However it takes time for the information to reach our eye.
Hence we see the event on a time delay basis. This is what is called Time dilation.
Information travels thru the medium of space.However how fast we receive the information depends how fast light signal moves which is variable thru the medium of space.
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Ronald 7 say: We can shorten that time by Magnification
For the likes of Hubble that means Gravitational Lensing
To see beyond our Universe you would need a Focal Lense as big as the Milky Way
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quantumclaustrophobe say: You've never seen anything exactly in the 'present'.... no matter what you look at - a splinter in your finger, or the galaxy of Andromeda - the light takes a finite amount of time to reach your eye. The further away something is, the longer in the past that light came from.
So - when Hubble looks at galaxies at the edge of the observable universe - that's how they *used to look* billions of years ago, as light has to travel at it's speed to reach us. If anything in those galaxies change - the news of that change has to make the trip at the speed of light - and we won't know of the change until it finally reaches us.
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rick29148 say: only in historical terms for objects FAR away ........................
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Donut Tim say: No.
We don't see anything in present time.
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John P say: The answer lies within your question. Though light travels very fast, it does have a definite speed.
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daniel g say: All visible light you see originated in the past. A supernova today and 100,000 light years you would not see for 100,000 years.
Your reflection in a mirror is what you were 10 - ^6 nanoseconds ago.( not including the visual acuity time)
All light you see took some finite of time to reach your eye and for your brain to process the vision. The past as it was.
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Jeffrey K say: No. We can only see light when it gets to our eyes. Light takes time to travel here. We see stars as they were hundreds of years ago. We see galaxies as they were millions of years ago. Nothing can go infinitely fast, so we can't see distant object as they are right now.
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Apprentice Ghost say: if you can;t be with the Present, how can you see the Present?
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say: No, not possible. Do an experiment. Lets make it simple. Have your friend walk down a road in a straight line from you. Rate of walking is 3 mile/hour so after an hour you cannot see him because he is an hour away.If he had a flashlight and flashed it you would see it instantly.
Lightspeed is 186,282 miles per second and he is only 3 miles away.
If he walked REALLY FAST AND GOT 372,564MILES AWAY and blinked his light it would get to you 2 seconds after he blinked it. because he is 2seconds x 186,282miles away. Nothing goes faster than the speed of Light.
For him to be 10 seconds away he would have to travel 1,862,820miles away(so nearly 2 million miles) He blinks his light and 10 seconds later you would see the blink.
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Tom S say: No.
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cosmo say: The relatively nearby stuff --- the Milky Way, all the Messier objects, almost all of the NGC catalog, are less than a few million lightyears away, and so we see them as they were a few million years ago. In the 13.8 billion year history of the Universe, that is very nearly "right now".
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Jackolantern say: The only way we have of seeing other objects in space is from their light. And light travels at a set speed. So, no, we can't see what's happening out there in real time. What Hubble is capable of doing, is make that light bright enough and clear enough for a great view of what light brings us to see. Even then, it's not a 'snap shot'. It's usually a long exposed photo that's been enlarged.
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Climate Realist say: With telescopes like Hubble, we can only see very distant objects in the distant past.
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Bill-M say: Distant past because of the distance and the speed of light.
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Bill say: the distance is so great that visible light is not seen by the telescope
it sees variations of the light spectrum and it only sees what happend a long time ago not what is happening now
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Nyx say: Everything you see is in the past. Light travels at 1 foot per second.
https://letsrunwithit.com/data/Images_00...
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Mark IX say: We're never going to see distant objects as they are now, light has a speed limit. If something is one lightyear away then what we're seeing is one year old. The science is undisputed, nothing travels faster than light.
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Who say: Sorry but do YOU not understand your question?
You say it takes time for light to travel - therefore you MUST be aware there is a time gap between it leaving A and arriving at B
BUT you ask if you will ever be able to see A (using a telescope at B) at the same time as the light you see leaves A
Do you not realize how absurd your question is?
(the ONLY time the the time gap can be zero is when A and B are at the same point)
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Robert say: Yes. The new radiowave telescopes, like the one that saw the black hole, can see in the present since radiowaves travel instantaneously.
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Choose a bloody best answer. It's not hard. say: Telescopes don't "see into space". They magnify the images of objects when the light hits their objectives.
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