Friday, December 26, 2008

Celestial Time Travel


Last night while going to bed, my thoughts went back to a previous thought about time travel that is related to my post October Thoughts about Closeness.


When you look through a telescope at celestial objects, you are in a sense, time traveling. the image you see has a time delay due to the speed of light. In other words, when you look at the the moon, you are seeing a moon that existed 2.6 seconds ago. Looking at Alpha Centauri, is a time delay of 4.2 years. So as a person goes from one object in the sky to another one, they are essentially time traveling through thousands of years. So the question is, in what time is the space between the objects? How far away is the space? In the absence of mass, does time exist?