From the time turner in Harry Potter to Back To The Future to Groundhog Day, traveling back in time provides us with the possibility of righting wrongs in our own past. It's one of the greatest tropes in movies, literature, and television shows: the idea that we could travel back in time to alter the past. After decades of research, we may have hit upon a solution that's physically possible. This was a time of conflict in Dark-Age Britain, with the Angles, led by King Edwin of Northumbria, fighting with tribes across the north of England.Įlsewhere, the Tang dynasty was rising in China and the Mayan empire was starting to lose its stronghold in what is Mexico today.The idea of traveling back in time has long fascinated humans, such as in Back To The Future's. Not just popular with astronomers, it also features in many sci-fi stories it has been visited several times in Star Trek, and is famous as being the home star system of the Silver Surfer.Ī bloated supergiant star between 55,000 and 196,000 times more luminous than our own Sun, the icy blue-white light set off on its journey to us some 1,400 years ago, in the year 620 AD. +1.25 Deneb is the 19th brightest star in the sky (read our guide to stellar magnitude) and is 1,400 lightyears away, based on recent measurements. Shining at the head of the Northern Cross, mag. More than twice as far away as neighbouring Hyades, the Pleiades has to be the most famous star cluster in the whole sky.Ī tight group of more than a thousand stars, M45, or the Seven Sisters, is a stunning sight in binoculars and telescopes alike and is the closest Messier object to Earth.Īt 440 lightyears away, the sparkling Pleiadean starlight we see on frosty autumn and winter evenings set off on its journey across space around the year 1580.Īt this time Elizabeth I was on the English throne, Francis Drake sailed back into Plymouth harbour on board the Golden Hind after his second epic voyage of circumnavigation, and Greensleeves was being performed for the first time. The Pleiades can be found by tracing the three stars of Orion's belt and following the line they create to find what appears as a 'smudge' in the night sky. To demonstrate, here we take a temporal tour of celestial objects that can be seen from a back garden. Science fiction has got it wrong you don’t need a TARDIS or a DeLorean to travel back in time: your own eyes will do just fine. It is expected that when it finally launches, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to look even further back in time and observe events that happened long ago in galaxies far, far away. Located in Ursa Major, GN-z11 is a young galaxy barely 1/25th the size of our own, and it is so far away that when its faint light is observed by astronomers they are looking back in time more than 13 billion years, to just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz)Īs for the most distant object ever seen in the Universe, the current record holder is a galaxy – GN-z11. Hubble’s view of galaxy GN-z11, the most distant galaxy ever observed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |