I think that telescopes are like time machines. When you look through it to space, you are not just getting close-up pictures of objects that may be millions of miles away, but also see deep into the past... This is because look times to travel these huge distances―even though it's speed is about 186,000 miles per second! Even the Sun's light takes about 8 minutes to make the 93 million mile trip to Earth. So that means you are actually and always seeing the Sun as it looked 8 minutes before! It works with other stats too except now we're talking years, not minutes.Light from Proxima Centauri, the second-closest star to us in our galaxy, takes four years to reach us.
Some of our telescopes are incredibly powerful. They see energy that was given off over 12 billion years ago! That's when the universe was very young. Telescopes are helping us solve the mysteries of our universe-how it formed, if there are other life forms in it, and what's going to happen to it-and to us-in the future.
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