Looking billions of years into the past… 🌌⏳ w/ Brian Cox

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]But the most distant light we can see is from the cosmic microwave background radiation. If you look at the Andromeda galaxy, which we can see with the naked eye, it's the most distant object you can see with the naked eye, and it's about 2 million light years away, which means the light took 2 million years to get to us. We can actually look so far out >> [music] >> that we can see almost back to 13.8 billion years ago, which is very close to the Big Bang. So, we can look to light that began [music] its journey before there were galaxies.

[00:00:26]And that's the the oldest light in the universe. As you look further out into the universe, to more and more distant galaxies, you're looking further back in time. If you look at something that's a billion light years away, then the light took a billion years to get to us. So, you see it as it was a billion years in the past. But