Tuesday, 4 January 2011

Is it possible to use Hubble Telescope to observe Earth in the past?

The only way you can use Hubble to view the Earth "in the past" is to swivel it and point it at the Earth now. Assuming that this didn't break the telescope (it would) you would collect images of the Earth's surface that were approximately $500times10^{3}/3times10^{8} = 0.0017$ seconds old, since that is how long it takes light to travel from the Earth's surface directly below HST to its $sim 500$ km orbital height above the Earth's surface.



The problem with what you suggest, is that although we might be able to pinpoint where the Earth was in the past with respect to its position now and the Galactic centre (actually that would be very hard in practice), the light that came from the Earth then has long since travelled beyond where the Earth is now.



For instance, let's say the Earth/Sun travel around the Galaxy at approximately 230 km every second and say we want to look at the spot where the Earth was 1000 years ago. Well, it turns out then that the Earth was at some location in space that is currently about $7times 10^{12}$ km away (7 trillion). But the light that came from the Earth then, has already been travelling outwards at the speed of light for 1000 years, covering a distance of 1000 light-years, which is about $10^{16}$ km. So that light passed by our current location in space more than 999 years ago.

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