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So for us on Earth,
the Neptune we see is always four hours in the past-four light-hours away.
But the distances to the planets,
even the farthest one...
are mere baby steps on a much grander scale
of the stars and galaxies.
As soon as we leave the Sun's immediate neighborhood,
we need to change the unitive distance
from light-hours to light-years.
A light-year is the yardstick of the cosmos.
A single one is nearly ten trillion kilometers,
or about six trillion miles.
It's a unitive distance, just like a meter or a mile.
It's the distance light travels in a year.
The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri,
is a little more than four light-years away from Earth.
How far away is four light-years?
NASA's Voyager spacecraft moves
at more than 56,000 kilometers an hour.
Even at that astonishing speed, it would take Voyager
more than 80,000 years to reach the nearest star.
And the stars of the Pleiades cluster,
400 light-years away.
The Ship of the Imagination
is equipped with a highly unusual capability-one-of-a-kind, actually.
It makes it possible for us to see what was happening
when the light from a distant star or galaxy first set out
on its long journey to Earth.
DEGRASSE TYSON: When that light left the Pleiades, about 400 years ago,
Galileo was taking his first look through a telescope.
A few years later, he tried to measure the speed of light,
but he couldn't do it.
He had a very clever plan, but the technology of that era
just wasn't good enough to measure the motion of anything
that moves as fast as light.
When we look at the Crab Nebula from Earth,
we're seeing much farther back in time.
The Crab Nebula was once a giant star,
ten times the mass of the Sun,
until it exploded in a supernova.
At its heart is a pulsar,
a collapsed star the size of a city,
spinning 30 times a second.
This pulsar's whirling magnetic field
whips nearby electrons into a frenzy,
accelerating them to almost the speed of light.
They shine with a blue glow that lights up the tendrils of gas
still unraveling from the supernova.
The Crab Nebula
is about 6,500 light-years from Earth.
According to some beliefs,
that's the age of the whole universe.
But if the universe were only 6,500 years old,
how could we see the light from anything more distant
than the Crab Nebula?
We couldn't.
There wouldn't have been enough time for the light
Our distant ancestors were just leaving the water for the land.
That's pretty old light,
but not nearly the oldest light we can see.
The oldest light is very faint,
a pale ghost in the night.
See that red blob inside the circle?
That's one of the oldest galaxies we've ever seen.
You're looking at 13.4-billion year-old starlight
as captured by the Hubble space telescope.
It's coming from the very first generation of stars.
What was happening on Earth back then?
Absolutely nothing.
There was no Earth, no Sun, no Milky Way.
They would not come to be for billions of years.
When we try to look even farther into the universe,
we come to what appears to be the end of space...
but actually...
it's the beginning of time.
DEGRASSE TYSON: Earth pulls on us.
Our lives are a relentless struggle with gravity.
That little girl is trying her best to climb out
of a gravitational well.
From our first efforts to stand to our final surrender,
we are struggling to overcome the Earth's pull.
We are born, live and die in a force field-one that is almost as old as the universe itself.
And how old is that?
To visualize the 13.8 billion year age of the universe,
we've compressed all of cosmic time
into a single year-at-a-glance calendar.
That one.
WILLIAM: That star is really two stars
so close together that they appear to be one.
I've been watching them through my telescope
since long before you were born.
They dance around each other very slowly.
More slowly than any planet moves around the Sun.
Many of the stars we see tonight,
perhaps most of them,
dance with invisible partners.
Gravity's empire governs all the heavens.
DEGRASSE TYSON: A century earlier,
Isaac Newton had been haunted
by the same absence of a mechanism for gravity.
How could distant bodies affect each other
across empty space without actually touching?
This "action at a distance," as he called it, baffled him.
In the 19th century, Michael Faraday discovered
that we were surrounded by invisible fields of force
that explained how gravity works.
The apple and the Earth don't touch each other,
but the fields between them do.
He imagined those lines of gravitational force
radiating out into space from every massive body-the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, everything.
Here was the answer to that question
that had stumped Newton.
In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell translated Faraday's idea
about fields of electricity and magnetism
into mathematical laws.
(whip cracks)
The crack of that whip is due to its tip
moving faster than the speed of sound.
It makes a shockwave,
a mini sonic boom, in the Italian countryside.
A thunderclap works the same way,
and so does the sound of a passing supersonic jet.
So why is the speed of light
any more a barrier than the speed of sound?
The answer is not just that light travels
about a million times faster than sound.
And it's not merely an engineering problem,
like building the first supersonic jet.
Instead, the light barrier
is a fundamental law of nature,
as basic as gravity.
Einstein found his absolute framework for the world,
this sturdy pillar among all the relative motions
within the motions of the cosmos.
Light travels just as fast,
no matter how fast or slow its source is moving.
Speed of light is constant, relative to everything else.
Nothing can ever catch up with light.
The thing about the laws of nature
is that they're unbreakable.
The job of physicists is to discover these commandments,
the ones that do not vary from culture to culture
or time to time
and hold true throughout the cosmos.
That's why, as Einstein showed,
you know, the ones that still shine their light upon us
long after they're gone.
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