Does starlight ever disappear?
- Kate Freer
- Apr 3, 2020
- 1 min read
"In empty space, the wave does not dissipate (grow smaller) no matter how far it travels, because the wave is not interacting with anything else. This is why light from distant stars can travel through space for billions of light-years and still reach us on earth."
I was just thinking about the time I went to the planetarium (with Ari?). Jackie, the astrophysicist I was collaborating with had reserved the Hayden Planetarium for us, so it was empty other than us, which is surreal to begin with. We were navigating through the stars. Two moments struck me that I will never forget. The first was when she turned on all the stars that we can't see because the frequency of their light is not visible to the human eye. The sheer amount was breathtaking.
The second was when she turned on time. The stars were traveling in cosmic time. 1 million years a second. 2 million years a second. 3. 4. 5. What became clear with that lens of cosmic time was their relationship to each other. And how my human perception of time is only one small perspective. Human time. Geologic time. Cosmic time. Linear time. Circle time. Spiral time.
That one could “turn” off and on time. —what a mind blowing idea....
Your thoughts on Cosmic Time and seconds representing millions of years... the lens of that -
makes me think of Ty's photo in his Interstellar Encounters post. How the streaks of light are determined by the shutter speed - the fraction of time that the camera stays open to capture light. So in conversation with your post... fractions of fractions a second instead of millions years. Time-microscope and time-telescope. Micro/macro.