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Why does the light we see from stars take thousands of years to reach us?
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Why astronomers have difficulty looking at distant stars except?
Astronomers have difficulty looking at distant stars because while we have highly specialized telescopes, they are in constant contention with various other celestial bodies. In addition to this, the light of distant stars takes hundreds of thousands of years to reach us, making it impossible to get a current look at a distant star.
Why do the stars look so small in the sky is this rhetorical?
The question is not rhetorical; it is quite valid. The visibility of our stellar neighbors relies upon the particular stars' magnitude, distance from our viewpoint, and atmospheric interference such as light clutter, pollution, and mists or clouds. It takes eight minutes for the light generated by our Sun to reach the Earth, and the nearest star is 4.2 light years away. That means that the light from that star takes 4.2 years to reach us.
What does it mean when people look up at the stars and say seeing them how they were millions of years ago?
Generally speaking, this is a gross exaggeration. You see the stars as they were, at most, a few centuries ago. The reason is the light travels at a limited speed. In other words, it takes time to reach you. Distance between stars is measure in light years, which is the distance that light travels in a year. For example, if you look at a star that is 100 light years away, the light you see now left it 100 years ago. The stars you see at night are within the small part of our galaxy that is closest to us. Those stars are at most a few hundred light years away. A handful are less than 10 light years away. The only thing you can with the naked eye see as it was millions of years ago is the Andromeda galaxy, a massive collection of stars 2.5 million light years away. With a telescope you can see farther galaxies.
Why is it when we look at stars it's like looking into the past?
Yes you are. The stars light takes time to reach the Earth. So, if the star changed and emitted some kind of light, we would only see it later. Therefore, looking at a star can result to looking back in time.
What can the distances to nearby stars be measured by?
Light years
When do stars appear?
The light emited by stars can take thousands of years to reach the Earth, because the stars can be located thousands of light years away. Stars viewed from Earth can only be seen at night because the light from the sun creates a glear on the atmosphere.
Why are the stars that you see in the sky now how they looked like thousands of years ago?
This is because the stars are so far away, that it takes the light from them thousands of years to get to Earth.
Does it sometimes take millions of years for starlight to reach earth?
Not for the stars you can see without a telescope. All of the stars you see at night are within a few hundred light years of Earth, so it does not take the light more than a few hundred years to reach us. There are stars in other galaxies that are millions or even billions of light years away. That light does take millions to billions of years to reach us, though the stars are too far away for us to thee them individually.
Could stars be dead?
The stars we see are so far away, that their light can take hundreds or thousands of years to reach us. So long after the light we saw left the star, but before the light arrived here, the star may have blown up. We would not know for a long time after that. So many of the stars that we do see may be long dead.
When you see stars in sky are you watching your past?
In a way - yes. Light from the sun (our nearest star) takes about 8 minutes 20 seconds to reach Earth. The light from the nearest star outside out galaxy takes about 75 years to reach us (so we see it as it was just before World War II started. Light from some stars may have taken many thousands - perhaps millions of years to reach us, and that star may already have exploded into a super-nova ! Light from distant stars may have started its journey before the Norman conquests... or before the extinction of the dinosaurs !
Why do you see stars as they were in the past?
The idea is that it takes a while for the light from the stars to reach us. A few years... or a few billion years, depending on what star you are talking about.
Do constellations have a fixed shape?
because stars cannot move fast enough for people to be able to tell that they moved from Earth, and also because it takes thousands of years for the light of stars to reach Earth. If the big bang happened at one particular moment, it would take eight minutes for the first light to reach earth (the sun is the closest star to the earth, and it is eight light minutes away)
Could you tell me about the stars?
our sun is much closer to us than the stars. Light from the sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, but the light fromthe next nearest star takes a sevral years to reach us
What radiates its own light that people can see from Earth?
The sun, plus any other star bright enough to stimulate a response in the human ophthalmic system.
How long does it take stars light to get to us?
In our Solar System, we see light from our sun reflected off the planets. In more distant galaxies, light from many millions of stars takes a long time to reach the Earth. It takes light 4 years to reach the Earth from Sirius, a near neighbouring star. Using the Hubble telescope, we can see the light from the Eagle Nebula, which takes 7,000 years to reach the Earth.
On average how do the distances of the nearest stars compare with those of the brightest stars?
Stars range in many different shapes and sizes some have super energy and others have less energy. Usually the more mass the star has the more light it will seem to emit more light, the distance can matter, one thing to remember when looking at the stars is that it can and does take thousands of years for the light from a star to reach the Earth. Some stars are brighter than others because they have more energy than others.
Are the stars measured in light years?
Stars are not measured in light years. The distance between them is.
