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Asked by bubbleyscientist to Nick, Alan on 12 Mar 2014.
Question: I know that when we look at stars, we are looking back in time. Do you think that if someone stood on a star and looked at Earth through a telescope, would they see the dinosaurs?
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Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 12 Mar 2014:
In theory yes, but they would be a long way away.
The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, to see them you’d need light that is at least 65 million years old.
Now, light travels very fast and mostly in straight lines. We call the distance it travels in a year, one light-year. As you need light that has been travelling for 65 million years, you’d need to stand 65 million light-years away.
That is a VERY long distance, so they’d need a very big telescope!
Oh, and you shouldn’t stand on a star, your feet would get very hot 🙂
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Nick Wright answered on 13 Mar 2014:
Yes, if you were on a faraway star and looked at the Earth through a telescope you would be seeing it in its past, but you would have to be very far away to see the dinosaurs, because they were last on Earth 65 million years ago – so you would need to be a distance of 65 million light years from Earth (because light travels 1 light year in 1 year!).
Comments
howhillm1 commented on :
That is an awesome question!
howshein1 commented on :
that is soooooooo cool!! I didn’t know that!
Nick commented on :
This is also one of the most important things for studying certain objects in astronomy. Because when we look at distant things we are looking back in time it means that if we look at really really distant things we can see what things looked like a long time ago. Unfortunately we can’t see the same object in the present time and in the past, but we can see how types of object (like galaxies) change over time. This has been really useful for studying how galaxies have grown over the life of the Universe – it turns out that galaxies merge and eat each other!