The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years

Tangential comment, but it’s crazy to think about how, when we look up at the stars in the sky, we’re seeing light in wildly varying degrees of age.

For example, when we look at the sun, that’s 8-minutes-old light. When we look at Polaris (the North Star), that light is 447 years old.

When we look at Andromeda?

Yeah, that light is 2.5 million years old.

Nit: I think that the light from the sun is about 100k years old. Wild.

How can that make sense, the photons are emitted and fly straight at us

Photons are not created on the surface but in the core where the environment has the higher pressure needed for the physical creation of the photon and the photon takes about that long to work its way out.