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First images from Euclid are in

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1413 points mooreds | 1 comments | 21 Oct 24 20:15 UTC | HN request time: 2.025s | source
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lefrenchy ◴[22 Oct 24 02:20 UTC] No.41910562[source]▶
It's just so crazy to me to see a galaxy 420 million light years away. That is so much time for what we're seeing to have changed. I presume life can form within that window given the right conditions, so to some degree it just feels a bit sad that the distance is so great that we can't actually see what may exist in this moment that far away
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gary_0 ◴[22 Oct 24 06:44 UTC] No.41911815[source]▶
Given that the speed of light is the speed of causality, technically it's not really 420 million years in the "past" in any meaningful sense. The present is relative, not universal. The collected light we see in our telescopes is a lie about a particular universe that will never be, at least in any tangible way. On a cosmic scale, every spot in the universe sees its own unique sequence of events going on around it, all of it rendered virtually immutable by the relative slowness of c.

It's a beautiful nightmare, isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

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nullwriter ◴[22 Oct 24 07:46 UTC] No.41912116[source]▶
Absolutely mind blowing - I've not thought of this and will be reading about it
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1. andrewflnr ◴[22 Oct 24 18:18 UTC] No.41917108[source]▶
Don't think about it too much. It's wrong. Relativity of simultaneity only kicks in when you have reference frames moving at noticeably different velocities. Which is... not entirely wrong in this case due to the expansion of the universe, but would be equally true of a nearby reference frame moving away equally fast. It's nothing to do with light travel time.

Ed: I've slipped into the fallacy a bit. Reference frames don't have locations, so they can't be "nearby". Just pretend I said "reference frame of a nearby object".