Everybody wants to jump on this bandwagon and throw in their two cents. Remember: Star Wars took place A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Star Wars happened way in the past, not the future, perhaps even before the existence of Earth. Furthermore, it happened in a very distant galaxy, perhaps millions or billions of light years away.
It’s simply a modern miracle that we can watch the story unfold before us on the big screen and your Blu-Ray player! Earth is not mentioned, and if it were, the people of Earth during those days would have been primitive indeed, if even we had evolved into homo-sapiens at that point in time.
Tag: Galaxies
Here’s how scientists are going to detect alien life from millions of miles away
Shouldn't we be looking for life on planets that formed over 10 billion years ago as they've had more time for life to form?
Planets that formed over 10 billion years ago are about 5 billion light years from us, meaning that if we could somehow study planets that far away (we can’t) the light reaching us from there would have taken 5 billion years to reach us. Therefore, we’d be seeing what the planet looked like 5 billion years ago, not what it looks like now. Below is what we are able to see of the most distant galaxy that we have seen to date. It’s about 13 billion light years and we are just seeing the early stages of development because it took light 13 billion years to reach us.
As you can see from the image, Hubble can barely make out the galaxy, what to speak of any planets that might be orbiting the billions of stars inside that galaxy. The best we can do is study planets in our vicinity of the Milky Way.
Our Beautiful Galaxy
We live in a very cool galaxy called the Milky Way. Just seeing it with visible light waves is cool enough!
We can also see it using different light waves, such as gamma rays, x-rays, near-infrared, far-infrared radio waves and microwave. Each view is different and shows you a very dynamic and energic galaxy, right out your back door!
Here’s what it looks like in visible light:
You can go outside and see this with the naked eye. What you’re looking at is our own galaxy seen edge on (because we are in an outer edge ourselves).
Now, here is the Milky Way as seen from various other frequencies of light. As you can see, we live in a beautiful galaxy! Full of light, energy, radio waves, gamma rays, x-rays, infrared light and so on:
Somewhere in the middle there is a big black hole. We’ve been able to detect the existence of our black hole because we can see stars orbiting around it very quickly, even though black holes themselves emit no light at all.