Started by Ethan Cole (@ethan_c) ·
how old is the light from the stars I can actually see
5 sources · 26 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “farthest star visible to the naked eye”
- Ended at
- Triangulum Galaxy
The Trail
- “farthest star visible to the naked eye” (google.com)
- Light-year (en.wikipedia.org)
- Deneb (en.wikipedia.org)
- Andromeda Galaxy (en.wikipedia.org)
- Triangulum Galaxy (en.wikipedia.org)
some people with perfect skies claim they can see this one too
What I came away with
Most naked-eye stars are within a few hundred light-years. Deneb is one of the farthest bright ones (distance estimates vary a lot, somewhere in the low thousands of light-years), and Andromeda's light is about 2.5 million years old.
Keep going
- the longest-standing video game record turned out to be impossible · Ethan Cole · 5 sources
- speedrunners reprogram Super Mario World with a controller · Ethan Cole · 6 sources
- you can measure the brain's magnetic field, which is absurdly faint · Quinn Harlow · 6 sources
- a second is 9,192,631,770 wiggles of a cesium atom · Dev Malhotra · 5 sources