Obviously I get how the light of their destruction hasn't reached us yet and we're looking 7,000 years into the past and all that... but how do we actually know that they were destroyed 6,000 years ago? The article just says that we've known it since 2007, and that "with our telescopes" we can... somehow see something different than what we can see? Which makes no sense, our telescopes are here where we are. Hubble is less than 350 miles up from the Earth's surface, which is nothing when you're talking about distances in light years.

My brain keeps trying to come up with some way we could know the base fact that the nearby supernova happened, and we know how big supernovas are thus we can assume we will see the Pillars get destroyed eventually, but it's not like we could detect a front wave of radiation or something else from the supernova that moves faster than light, because nothing moves faster than light.

Answers plz.

Oh wait oh wait! If the supernova were halfway between us and the Pillars, we could have seen it happen already, and know that the outward explosion was also traveling backwards towards the Pillars, which were farther away. And we could calculate the speed of the supernova explosion traveling away from us, even if we can't see it, because we know how fast that shit normally travels.

Okay, I'm fine now.

something must move faster than light

or


what do you mean by 'destroyed'? like it's a cloud formation that will have re-shaped to another configuration by the time the next 6000 years of light reaches us?

are we extrapolating from earlier pictures of 7,030 year old light?

Yeah, except it will only be 1000 years. It's 7,000 light years away, and we know it was hit* by a supernova 6,000 years ago, so in 1,000 more years we'll actually see it.


*And yeah, I think it's basically just going to be like a cloud formation that whiffs away into a new shape, on a grand scale.

so the supernova was less than 6,000 years ago?

I'd love to hang out with you two smoking grass. Except I don't think CF does that.

eeer!

You don't know that. You're convinced when it goes below the horizon it just maintains orbit till you can see it again. But it could be sneaking off taking pictures of who knows what, peeking in Venus' bedroom window, or Mar's bathroom.
We all know those ass-tronomers are perverts. :yesnod:

Just look what Hubble did a few days ago, a 1.5 Billion pixel photograph.

We are so nothing

black holes are dense

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain

[crowd]Hoooow nothing are we?[/crowd]

I'm reminded of a quote from my favorite book series by David Eddings:

"Man thinks he rules the world but there are all manner of creatures who are indifferent to our overlordship."