• Question: what is the furthest into space we have ever been able to see

    Asked by ledw to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 19 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      What interesting about the universe is that it’s so big that distance is measured by how far light can travel in one year (a lightyear) – that’s about 600 billion miles… it also means that because we see using light, that looking far away in the universe is looking back in time – so that say we see a star that 10 million light years away that light left that star 10 million years ago, so we are literally looking millions of years into the past!

      So, to answer your question the furthest we’ve seen with a telescope is about 13 billion light years away (or stuff that happened only half a billion years after the universe began!)

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