Telescopes Are Time Machines — JWST's 13.4-Billion-Year Lookback

Every telescope is a time machine. Because light takes time to travel, every photon a telescope catches is a message from the past — from moonlight that is 1.3 seconds old, to sunlight 8 minutes and 20 seconds old, to the James Webb Space Telescope's record-breaking galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, whose light traveled 13.4 billion years to reach us. In this video, we climb the full ladder of cosmic lookback time using real physics and real observations: • Moon, Sun, Proxima Centauri (4.24 years) and Andromeda (2.5 million years) — the nearby rungs • JWST's JADES-GS-z14-0 (redshift 14.32): the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy, seen as it was less than 300 million years after the Big Bang • Supernova light curves stretched by (1+z) • 190 quasar clocks ticking slower by (1+z) • The cosmic microwave background: the oldest light in existence Honest science: we can only look BACK. The cosmic horizon keeps the future out of reach.