ANSWERS: 5
  • No no no. The images are there if there is eyesight to see them. Over the ages we've developed better and better "eyes" to look at the universe.
  • The speed of light?! ;-)
  • correction we are taking pictures up to 14 billion light years away. It is red shifted light , yes but as old as the universe.
  • No no The image we are seeing is, in your example, 70 million years old. This means that we are not seeing the other galaxy as we would 'today', but 70 million years ago. It's weird in many ways, as it means that the galaxy you are looking at could have been destroyed LONG before humans arose on the earth, and yet here we are still looking at it as it if existed. Fascinating stuff.
  • Actually, we cannot see 70 million light years away. The most distant galaxies we can see appear to be about 13 billion light years away i.e. the light has taken 13 billion light years to reach us. Actually, at the time the light was emitted, they were not so far away, but the space they have traveled through has stretched while they traveled, red-shifting them and making them further away now than when the light was emitted, without anything traveling faster than light.

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