Tractus

I love astronomy.

It's just so amazing, looking at the stars and realizing that they're not just friendly little points of light that seem to be just out of reach. They're really countless lightyears away. Most of them burn brighter, bigger, and hotter than our own sun, which seems so powerful and huge.

Most people don't really realize that light has to travel to get from place to place, same as the rest of us. Of course, the reason why we don't think about it is because light that we produce or see on our planet has to travel so little that it seems instantaneous to us. The sun rises eight minutes before we see it. That, though, is not a particularly long amount of time, considering how fast light travels (299,792,458 meters per second, in case you were wondering). What's really fascinating is that because some galaxies are so far away from our own, we're actually seeing into the past.

Woah. Hold on. What? Let me repeat this for emphasis, because it's really too cool to say just once.

We're seeing into the past.

Some galaxies are so far away that it takes light billions of years to travel to our corneas. We can see almost to when we think the formation of the universe happened.

Makes you question how hard-and-fast all those science 'laws' you were taught are, huh?