2 Quotes by Carolyn Collins Petersen

When you look out in space, you’re looking back into time. The farther across space you look, the further back in time you see. This means the telescopes and instruments we use to study the cosmos are really time machines.

The light from the next closest star, called Proxima Centauri, shows us how it looked just over four years ago. The light from a galaxy that lies 65 million light-years away left that galaxy when the dinosaurs were facing extinction. The most distant objects and events existed when the universe itself was only a few hundred thousand years old. Astronomers see them as they were more than 13 billion years ago. When you look out in space, you’re looking back into time.