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The Busy Center of the Lagoon Nebula

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‘Once-in-a-lifetime’ explosion will bring a new star to the night sky (edition.cnn.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Read up on reference frames.

Discussing astronomical events would be incredibly tedious if we had to qualify everything by how many light years away / how long ago the light we’re measuring was created.

Put another way - everyone already knows we’re looking at the past, it’s like saying the sky is blue.

[–] fuzzzerd 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This has always confused me, but reference frames makes conceptual sense to me.

Even still, I like to think about how long ago what I'm seeing now actually occurred.

For example when we see a planet in our solar system in the sky we know it's still technically in the past, but it's still in timescales humans can relate to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes, and if you want to take it to pedantic extremes, EVERYTHING you see is in the past because it takes at least 13ms for your eyes to transmit signals to your brain, and your brain to interpret the signals. (This is based on recent research from MIT but it's far from definitive, point being it takes time for our meat computers to interpret reality) That's why the whole argument is a bit silly.

Astronomy is just that, adding orders of magnitude the further away something is.

[–] fuzzzerd 2 points 5 months ago

I'm in agreement with you, cause even with the eye/brain processing time, you still have the time for light to reflect off whatever you're seeing and hit your eyes. So there's definitely some delays.

I think the interesting part for me, is when the orders of magnitude make a difference on the human scale

The few milliseconds it takes light to reflect and my brain to process it is not really tangible, but knowing that this nova in OP occurred thousands of years ago and is just reaching out eyes now is worth noting, IMO.