Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

What kind of instruments, according to NASA, can detect stars that are so far away that they are incomprehensibly remote?

Astronomers quantify the distance in space in terms of a light-year. It is determined by the six trillion mile journey a light ray makes in a year.

All light in the cosmos moves at the same precise speed, or roughly 670 million miles per hour.

However, the primary justification for using light years is due to the vast distances we interact with in space. Just estimating the distance to the closest star, a dim red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, which is only 24,000,000,000,000 miles away, produces unwieldy figures if we adhere to miles or kilometres.

Our planet and all the stars we see at night are located within the Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years across. In light of that, there have been approximately 5,000 years of documented human history. As a result, it takes light from a star at one end of our galaxy 20 times longer to travel to a star at the other.

In the aeons that have passed since, a galaxy whose light took 14 billion years to reach our small world has shifted even farther away. If we halted the cosmos from growing and extended out a really long tape measure, the present physical distance to that distant signal would be just over 46 billion light years! It becomes difficult to measure lengths across the cosmos, even in light years. But using a common unit of measurement, like miles, is genuinely demeaning. The distance between here and the limit of our field of view is roughly 276,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

And it keeps expanding (Source: Earthj/sky.org)

We are informed that NASA has created devices on Earth that can measure distances using light wave frequencies and can record how far, how heated or chilly, how large and how luminous objects are from Earth—up to a distance of 276 trillion miles.

Utilising solar outbursts, solar energy, and atmospheres. through temporal warps, comet trails, and micrometeroids. Gravity is pulled by the asteroid belt and celestial trajectories through the bending of light.

Damn these NASA employees are good!

Unless they are?

Telling someone they are only a tiny, tiny, tiny wheel in a very, very Big Wheel is a surefire way to make them feel incredibly small.

However, why doesn’t anyone even wonder how in the world they can detect such light at such a distance.

Additionally, doesn’t light, like a torch, expand and flare as it moves farther away?  How then can they be certain that the light is coming from a star located a godzillion miles away?