Space events and time...?????

If we see a supernova explosion that happened, say for example 50 million light years away are we actually looking into the past? Is place something totally different that what we know? Just curious.

Thanks,

Roger

[edit on 10-3-2009 by spacedoubt]

Think of the sky like a picture from along time ago..... Its just an old picture just arrived in the mail from grandma who lives in i dont know malaysia

The sun as we see it is 8 minutes old, not instantaneous. I'm sure I don't need a link to prove this. You link thrivers.

Yes in essence that is pretty much how look back time is, the further you try to look back at objects in space the further back in time you are looking. For example if we are looking at a Red Giant currently in the sky that is lets say 10 million years old, more than likely if we went all the way to where the red giant is and took a look at where it is in present time it wouldn't be there. Though one note I feel I should make, I know I more than likely goofed on the time it takes for a red giant to go into supernovae or collapse into a black hole, just used 10 million as an example .

Also, I believe astronomers have been trying to look further back into time, but have come to or rather have been at a road block for some time. Being that are telescopes aren't powerful enough. My teacher for my astronomy course told us about the James Webb space telescope which is supposed to help those astronomers and scientists to look further back into space; it is also supposed to be leaving the Van Allen Radiation Belt (From what my teacher has told me thus far.) Though I'm not sure if it will remain in the outer and leave the inner or if it will leave it all together. Either way, would be interesting to see the Universe as to how it looked when it was even younger

www.jwst.nasa.gov...
(The James Webb space telescope)

this is a confusing subject for many people, but it's very simple in essence once you understand.

you see the red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the night sky. Betelgeuse is located approximately 600 light-years away from your eyes. So, the image of Betelgeuse you see, right in that moment, is Betelgeuse 600 years ago. The time the "image" you see took to travel from Betelgeuse to your eyes.

now you see a lightning hitting a tree. I'm 4 meters in front of you. the light travels to our eyes, but, since I'm in front of you, I will se the lightning first. Of course that the distance its so small when you consider the speed of light that it seems we saw it both at the same time, so it doesn't matter the gap between both our sightings, as it doesn't matter the fact that the light took a small fraction of a picosecond to travel from the actual lightning hitting the tree to my eyes. That time is irrelevant due to it's insignificant value.

but, 600 years are not so irrelevant as 0.00001*10E-1024 picoseconds. At least not to a human. But, in an infinite universe, where time and space can't be measured, 600 years are too irrelevant.

we are looking at the past, be that's just relative to our own measures and conventions. house-flies have a life-span of two weeks, so they could say It ook much more time then *you* (a human) think writing this explanation. For you 5 minutes are not much, but for a fly that's a lot.

I hope you understood, and sorry for any mistakes I'm not english.

If light has a limited velocity then there is a medium that light
travels through.

With no medium then light travel might be infinite.
That is nothing to slow it down and will accelerate to infinite speed.

So the nova happened in the past and various theories on the
universe are based on this which I must have read about at one
time and now can't recall.

Yep. If we look in a telescope and see a galaxy that's 14 billion light years away, then for all we know that galaxy could be completely gone, because what you're seeing is what the galaxy looked like 14 billion years ago.

It's just like the fact that if you take a spaceship and travel at the speed of light for whatever number of years, and then return to earth at the same pace, thousands of generations will have passed when you're back. Okay maybe not thousands of generations, but you will fast forward time.

[edit on 30-3-2009 by ZikhaN]

Preety strange how the past connects to present.
I agree with the op and give star and flag to the thread since some things in life just let me in constant owe!

On average, how long does it take lights reflected off Jupiter to reach our planet?

Just curious.

Just wondering if the Big Bang start point has been determined.

If everything is going away from us, are we the big bang start point.
This then goes back before Galileo when the earth was the center
of the universe.

We just can't escape knowing anything sound.
God could just as well put us in a universe that looked like
it had no beginning or ending.
Yeah, He could do that.

And radiation from all direction has a number of reasons of
which require a constant generation.
And worms holes are not new as Lord Kelvin gave us electrical
vortexes and whirlpools that connect to Alfven and the electrcal
universe.

The Big Bang happened approx~ 13.5-14 Billion years ago. The Milky Way was not at the center. As it appears that things are moving away from us, we as well are also moving. Though, I am not sure exactly what we are moving towards or what is causing our movement. I like to believe that the Galaxies moves in much the same way that the stars in the galaxy move around it's center and the planets move around the Sun. I am not sure if this helped, but the Hubble Telescope in space once sat an looked at particularly boring part of space and took a time laps photo from September 24, 2003 through January 16, 2004.. What it developed is now called the ultra deep field, shows galaxies that are 13 billion light years away. It is a beautiful picture.

there is no way to determine where the start point of the big bang is, because space/time itself expanded, like a foam.

the start point is not there anymore.
and the space/time expanded at super relativistic velocities in the beggining, so it is concievable that hundreds of billions, even trillions of light years across, but we would only ever be able to what is going on within 14 or so billion light years. because that is as far as light will have been able to travel.

I love the universe on this scale

The distance to the planet Jupiter varies from about 400 million miles to about 600 million miles, depending on the relative positions in their orbits. So light takes somewhere between 35 minutes and 55 minutes to travel between the 2.