I think tcburnett may be right as regards “the stronger the telescope, the further back in time you can see”. This does not apply to our own solar system, which is quite small on the general scale of things.
If you train a powerful telescope as far as you can in the universe, however, you are seeing objects as they appeared billions of years ago. That is because the light itself has taken billions of years to reach us, and the message carried by that light is old.
You can examine quasars and other mysterious objects on the edge of our universe with very powerful telescopes. An ordinary telescope won’t show you very much of the outer reaches, whereas a serious mama telescope can focus on a point in the sky and bring you an image that you wouldn’t otherwise see.
So, in a sense I think it is a question of the definition of the image, but in another sense a more powerful telescope allows you to see light and other electromagnetic radiation that you could not possibly detect.
The farther away you’re looking, the older the information will be (in the sun’s case, since it is 8 light-minutes away, the information we receive is 8 minutes old).
To look farther away with reliable definition, you need better telescopes.
Better telescopes allow you to observe older information with higher definition.
So it is correct to say that bigger and better telescopes allow you to see further into the past.
You are 20 minutes too late, Abe. I already conceded the point. I didn’t care whether it was technically accurate or not, I was just trying to convey a concept. It was easier to drop it than lose the whole idea of the OP by making the answer so complicated that handy won’t have any idea what is going on.
This is purely a question of semantics, but even semantics has a certain logic to it. When we look at the sun, we’re not seeing anything from the past. We’re seeing the present state of the light that happened to have left the sun 8 minutes ago.
As for the telescope being able to let people see further into the past, I think you’ve got it backwards. If you train a telescope at a distant star, aren’t you in effect bringing your vision closer to the star, thus decreasing the time it takes for the light to travel to you, thereby transporting you less far into the past (that’s the best way to put it, I guess)?
I’m sorry tcburnett, I never thought you would be so offended by that simple remark. Since you seem to have emotional ties to this thread, and since this thread has seemingly already been run into the ground, I will thank you for stepping out of my way, and I will keep this brief. Handy, light is evil. Don’t listen to these people. Use common sense. This subject doens’t seem too difficult, so I guess you’ll catch on fairly quickly.
I consider myself an amateur astronomer. But I think the OP has been answered. The further away something is, the longer it takes the light to get here…so, the older the image is. We see the past.
No. You’re still capturing the same photons at the same point (your telescope/eye). The distance between the source and your eye is not changed by the telescope. The telescope increases the effective size of your eye so you can capture and resolve/focus more light.
With telescopes, the primary thing is larger aperature. Magnification helps only a little (in fact it can often reduce clarity).
Seeing the past helps us understand astronomy/cosmology. But for all practical purposes, it’s the present, because we cannot interact with the past (speed of light limitation).
(didn’t mean to confuse the OP…yes, we see the past…the moon is actually how is was over 1 second ago, the sun over 8 minutes ago, the closest star over 4 years ago, the closest large spiral galaxy about 2 million years ago)
Conversely, astronomers 4.5 billion light years away can watch the formation of the Earth.
tcburnett, guess you’ve been waiting for me to catch up here so let’s see. A bigger telescope won’t get you any nearer to the sun & thus, shouldn’t change the time part. However, it can make things more visible & sharper [not that you should look at the sun] so you get a clearer image of what happened in the past
Im no young scientist, I already have a BA from UCSD a long time ago.
You’ve got it all wrong, you don’t need a stronger telescope, but a longer one. If you had one that was a few light years long you could see right into those stars instantly!
To convert from units of distance to units of time, we use the speed of light as a conversion factor. Let’s see 1000 mm is one meter, so we want see how far in the future one meter is. c = 299896943 m/sec. We divide 1 m by c and we get:
3.33447880460722135470383904513e-9 secs or approximately
0.00000000334478 secs.
There is never a chunk of fire hose handy to bludgeon someone with when you really need one.
On a serious note that telescope could make the image take longer to get to your eye. A Newton reflector or cassegrain increases the distance the light has to travel. Massive thick lenses in a refrector slow the light.
