NASA’s observation came thanks to one of the most powerful telescopes on the planet. Light is the only reason we can see anything at all. From the simplest object to the most distant galaxy, everything becomes visible only when light reaches us, while some areas remain dark.
If humans could somehow move at that speed, physics tells us we’d reach unimaginable distances in the cosmos — but we’d never return to the same present moment. Spacetime would stretch behind us, and time as we know it would change.
Luckily, we don’t have to leave Earth to see that far. Telescopes have been helping us peer deeper into space for decades. And now, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), high in Chile’s desert, has done something extraordinary: it recorded the first light — the oldest observable light in the universe.