Friday, 4 February 2022

You Looking At Us?

The James Webb infra-red telescope is in place and we can expect to see from amazing pictures coming back from it soon as it examines objects over 13.6 billion light-years away meaning, because of the time it takes light to travel across the vast Universe, it will be looking at objects as they were 13.6 billion years ago.
To flip that around, if there are any beings there looking our way they just see the inky blackness of Space because to them we are not there yet as Earth was created only 4.5 billion years ago.
That did make me wonder how far we can see with the naked eye and what would anyone on a far distant planet looking at us less than 4.5 billion light years away see?
The European Space Agency state that of the approximate 9,000 Space objects that we can look at without a telescope, the nearest star we can see is Alpha Centauri which is about 4.3 light years away and the farthest is 4,000 light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia but the most distant object visible to the unaided eye is The Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million light years away.
To put that into perspective, anyone in Alpha Centuri would be looking at us from about 26 trillion miles away as we were in 2018 but the Cassiopian's would see us in 1978 bc when the ancient Egyptians were a thing but anyone looking on from the Andromeda Galaxy would see us as we were 2.5 million years ago when we were transitioning from ape like mammals to the very earliest hominids.     
Does make you realise why nobody from Andromeda has paid us a visit, they are probably thinking those Earthlings need a few more million years to evolve first while the Alpha Centurian's are obviously waiting for Justin Bieber to finish his singing career before coming our way.

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