If you're gonna keep posting up pics like this (which I'm all in favor of, by the way), at least tell us when they're false color. I strongly suspect this one is.

Oh, it's the "dust" that makes the eye look red. I'll have to remember that excuse.

Humans have been here for an infinitesimal amount of time. For us, it's like looking out of one frame of film in a fouteen billion year long film and we think we'll see someone calling back. Doubtful indeed. But the possiblities now look endless as well.

eli, get off charles' computer

Looking into space is looking back in time.

In 100 years, I suspect people will laugh at this idea like we now laugh at the people who believed the earth occupied the center of the galaxy.

Dude. Look at my hands. Look at my fucking HANDS!

@5: The "looking back in time" thing will always hold, unless you're saying we'll have time travel. And even that wouldn't change the fact that looking at something 2 million light years away is seeing it as it was 2 million years ago.

There was some idiot on KIRO FM Sunday night claiming that sun spots are evidence that the sun is not all gas and the big bang theory is discredited.

@7 -- Sure it will.

And nothing will ever travel faster than the speed of light.
And gravity is caused because everything in the universe moves through a fourth dimension expressed as time multiplied by the inverse of i.

Or to put it another way -- if we're always looking back through time, our position in the universe must be the latest. Doesn't that statement - on the face of it - sound silly?

Unless you're talking about some kind of relative time...

@1 all space images are false color, but from what I understand, the colors NASA assigns aren't random.

Could it be...Sauron?

@9 Unlike the belief that Earth is the center of the Universe, the theory you're referring to is based on science, not arrogance.

Light travels at a constant speed when moving through a vacuum, called the "speed of light". One "light year" is the distance light travels in one year when moving through a vacuum. therefore, If we see an object through a telescope that is one light year distant, we are seeing that object as it was one year ago. Some people like to refer to this as "looking back in time" but that is confusing and far from the truth. A more accurate analogy would be to say that you are looking at a photograph.

This is why Charles and other philosophers like him are so annoying when they talk about science. In his quest to assign meaning to scientific discoveries, Charles distorts the facts and confuses his readers.

@10, hardly. Many, if not most of them, are natural. But you're right that the colors aren't random when they're false.

I don't care if it's natural, a photo, or time travel. I'm enjoying Mudede's day in space.

Dude, just because we can't see the present moment in distant planets and galaxies doesn't mean the present moment does not exist there. "We alone" are by no means the only present and future "of all this space, stars, moons and galaxies." What a narrow view.

It takes for light to travel to the Earth. I'd love to hear how could we not be looking at a picture from thousands or millions of years ago?

time*

Odds are most planets we can observe haven't changed all that much since the light we're observing left their surface: even crossing the entire galaxy at the speed of light only takes a few tens of thousands of years, not particularly long in terms of drastically altering a planets habitability.

@1,10,13

Astronomical images span the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The only time you might say it's not a "false color" image is when the data consist of entirely visible wavelength observations (say, Johnson B+V+R or SDSS g+r). Even in those cases, when the filter profiles are matched to some color that your eye perceives and intensities are scaled accordingly, images of deep-space objects (nebulae, galaxies, supernova remnants, etc.) never appear as your eye would see them, unless you gained the ability to integrate photons to account for the low surface brightness of the objects.

That said, there are cases where astronomers (amateur and professional) attempt to recreate an image with colors "as your eye would see it." For instance:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap101003.html
Monitor calibrations notwithstanding.

Here's an even longer diatribe on color:
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/CO…

Hard to believe that there are people who don't know that
1) we see only light
2) it travels at a fixed speed

Light travels at a constant speed when moving through a vacuum, called the "speed of light". One "light year" is the distance light travels in one year when moving through a vacuum.

Light travels at a constant speed when moving through a vacuum by itself for short distances.

The light we're observing is not in a vacuum by itself.

The light we're observing is not always travelling short distances.

"Speed of light" only makes sense in comparison to another relative speed. A car going 50mph toward the sunrise is going the speed of the rotation of the earth + the speed of the earth’s revolution if we’re talking speed relative to the sun.

I’m not making this up. This is Einstein. If you know the problems with the General Theory of Relativity, you know exactly where this argument goes next.

@15 -- What is it about time that only lets us see backward through it? Does it have something to do with the speed of light?

@20: But, light leaving (or arriving at) your car is moving at a fixed speed, oh, let's call it C, but is shifted blue or red. That's part of how 'they' can tell that the universe is expanding ... distant things are red-shifted proportional to their distance. And the fixed speed of light is what forces all the zany-ness of relativity.

@21: We're not seeing 'backward' through time, any more than reading a history book is looking back through time. I have the sense that you're slow-playing this and an actual, non-ignorant hand is about to be played.

@15: Your universal "now" is, if I understand things, an irrelevant construct. There is no way to coordinate, verify etc., etc. anything more quickly than the speed of light. So, the Sun and all of the inner planets could be vaporized 'now'-ish, and our little Voyager spacecraft out in the Kuiper Belt or wherever would continue to receive radio instructions (if it still did, which it doesn't) from Earth for a few more hours, maomeno, and there would be no way ... NO WAY ... to distinguish that reality from the one where everything continues as is. Until the requisite hours have passed that allow light to travel the intervening distance.

Another issue is that an observer in a strong gravitational field, say near a black hole, would be experiencing time significantly differently than you or I do, and your "Now? .... Now? how about now?" would be meaningless to them.

Your perceptions of what's in the room around you are all a few nanoseconds delayed, meaning you're looking a very very wee way back in time every time you look at anything.

Dude! Look at my HANDS!

@21,22: I should have said something like, "hand without feigned ignorance" instead.

And, to clarify: we're not looking at light.

Astronomical images span the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Didn't we just discover subatomic particles that travel at a speed faster than light? If there is no way to coordinate, observe, verify anything faster than the speed of light, then how would the previous sentance make sense?

The black hole is only one of the instances where light "slows down" relative to the speed of light outside the black hole. The idea of "time" slowing down is directly related to light "slowing down" relative to light outside the black hole.

I'm questioning the assumption that time and light are as tightly coupled.

We're not seeing light emitted from objects millions of years ago. We're recording electromagnetic information hitting our sensors now and pretending it travelled in a straight line at a constant speed through a universe expanding at a constant speed in through three dimensions of space.

And then we're coloring it so it looks pretty.

ALL this math rests on the not-so-secure assumption that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

Andromeda hardly counts as a distant galaxy. Plenty of heavier elements there, and plenty of time for primordial goo to stir. I'm guessing more of an editing oversight, possibly by the quoter, than a bold assertion on Rees' part.

@24: Speak for yourself. I'm totally looking at light.

@26 -- unless you want to get into it about the difference between vision and perception...

@25: I'm going to let the scientific process grind along a bit before I take that claim as gospel. I'm not a physicist, but I had to wonder about measurement error on that. I'm eager to see the effect replicated many times.

Are we moving toward some sort of 4,000-year-old -universe cosmology here? Starting to get a whiff of that from you.

@27: Sorry, I made an offensive assumption. With my human eyes, I'm limited to visible light.

Nope. I'm more of a "our assumptions are as as silly as assuming the earth is flat" kind of guy. People trot out this "we're looking back through time" line as if it means something useful.

It's poetry that either means something to physicists that it doesn't mean to the rest of us (Einstein and the dimension of time multiplied by the inverse of i) or means nothing at all (dude, did you know you can never actually see your hand?)

If we're talking Einstein, I like to point out there's a lot of stuff that smells like bullshit written into the general theory.

If we're talking meaningless information, we might as well suggest the stars are painted with a very fine paintbrush on the inside of a sphere.

To this date, four hundred years after Newton, we still have no idea what gravity is. Let's not pretend we understand looking back in time.

@29: "dude, did you know you can never actually see your hand?"

We can go as far as our contrarian nature compels us down that rabbit hole ... Once you head down that path, there is no logical reason to stop anywhere before you get to nothing means anything, because our perceptions are all 'internal' manifestations. Right?

Yeah, I read Polanyi when I was a sophomore. ("Dude, my idea that I have hands is a total internal construct! Dude, what does 'internal' mean, anyway? Dude!") Interesting, but I somehow managed to not let it be the only filter through which I interpret things.

I'm glad you're not taking this in a creationist direction, but I'm now officially bored with your pseudo-troll mental fappery. Go find some teenagers to impress.

We're the only people in the room.

As to my hand (usually its down your mom’s panties, by the way):
Descartes went down that road in the 16th century. (I wonder what he thought about the earth’s position in the universe)

The point we both agree upon: That conversation is meaningless bullshit. If that’s the conversation we’re having, I’m out too.

My only request: please don’t replace “dude, there’s no way to really know where my hand is” with “did you know we’re really looking back in time when we look at things far away” when you’re looking for something meaningless to say.

We pointed a machine in a direction in space and got back a cool picture. It’s pretty. Make it your desktop background. The rest is just guessing.