We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Here's a question we all ask ourselves at least once when we're young: Where does that starlight come from? It's been there before I was born, and before my grandmother, and her grandmother were born. So just how far is that star from Earth?
We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known universe.
A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light.
We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.
Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.
Do not look at stars as bright spots only. Try to take in the vastness of the universe.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.
There comes a point in your life when you realize how quickly time goes by, and how quickly it has gone. Then it really speeds up exponentially. With that, I think you start to put a lot of things into context; you start to see how huge the world is, and really, the universe.
Stars are extremely far apart. We cannot imagine any way currently available to get to the nearest one, besides the sun.