30-year-old black hole discovered by
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
No, really: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
There's not really such a thing as "right now, over there". To use the obvious example, from the perspective of the light, no time has passed since it was emitted at the object and our observing it.
There simply is no such concept in relativity. For two events A and B separated in space, some observers will see them happening simultaneously, some will see A occur before B, and still other will see B occur before A.
This is the same reason FTL drives are also, fundamentally, time machines. It's really a very profound thing; there's no "yeah, but really we know there's an absolute time frame underneath it all"... there really, really isn't an absolute time frame, and you really, really can't say how old the black hole would be if you "instantaneously" transported there; it is just as valid to instantaneously appear when it is 31 years old as it would be to appear when it is 100,000,029 years old (taking of course the estimated age as its true age). Or, IMHO, just as invalid because FTL and instantaneous truly don't exist.
Yes, if you change your claim to be sublight and non-instantaneous we can compute how old it would be, but that's a profound goal post shift.
The Minkowski metric is a mindbender, the moreso once you realize that it is not some weird mathematical abstraction with no connection to reality, it is reality, or at least a much better approximation than the one we instinctively use. The "weird mathematical abstraction with no connection to reality" is the implicitly Euclidean/Galilean metric that exists in our heads. (Which can actually be demonstrated to contain fundamental contradictions if you poke them hard enough.)
It may help to read the preceding bit of the work.
It is probably also not necessarily clear which part of that page is talking about the fundamental contradictions of the metric if you haven't read the preceding chapters. The key sentence that makes the point I am referring to is "Before blithely dismissing this concern as non-sensical, it's worth noting that modern physics has concluded (along with Zeno) that the classical image of space and time was fundamentally wrong, and in fact motion would not be possible in a universe constructed according to the classical model.", where the "classical model" is one based on a Euclidean metric in which time is simply another spatial dimension that acts weird for no apparent-within-the-model reason, rather than being an actually special dimension as it is in the Minkowski metric. Also, "In all four of Zeno's arguments on motion, the implicit point is that if space and time are independent, then logical inconsistencies arise regardless of whether the physical world is continuous or discrete." where again, space and time being independent is a characteristic of the Euclidean/Galilean metric. (A little rough to be pointing you to the middle of that very-fine work, but it makes the point far better than I can.)
The age of the universe
The age of all the stars we see in the sky
How long ago that supernova occurred
On and on.
I get it. There is a disconnect between my timeframe and that of a different acceleration frame. But they are related in a precise calculatable and empirically-confirmed way that lets me set a clock in one and know exactly what the clock in the other will read.
That is simply not interesting. We aren't able to instantaneously transport ourselves. So what we think might happen when we do that, is pure fantasy.
The distance between the two of us is very tiny. The error in simultaneity between the two of us would be the time it takes a light ray to travel between the two of us. 84 milliseconds in the worst case. So I cannot have a -1 or +5 in age difference with you. The wiggle room is around 84 ms.
If you are 1 light year away, the wiggle room now expands to 1 year! Depending on the observer I am 0 or +1 years older than you.
On astronomical scales the wiggle room is quite huge. For example there is a frame of reference in which the blackhole celebrates its 30th birthday AFTER the year 2009. When such a frame exists it does not make sense to say that the star is now 50M years old. There is no notion of simultaneity. The word "now" is profoundly misleading. There is no absolute time.
Lets say you are a soldier that drops a bomb that kills 30 people. However from your POV you see only 3 dead people. You cannot claim that in your frame of reference only 3 people died. You can only say "I saw 3 dead people". In reality 30 people died. Similarly, there are innumerable frames of reference in which the 30th birthday of the blackhole occured after the year 2009 on earth. So it is misleading to say that the star is now 50M years old.
If you want to nitpick, the only thing we can say is that the black hole's birth is in our past light cone.
If you were riding the photon, then basically time would stand completely still for you. But that is theoretically impossible...
Although the evidence points to a newly formed black hole in SN 1979C, another intriguing possibility is that a young, rapidly spinning neutron star with a powerful wind of high energy particles could be responsible for the X-ray emission
I think a lesson on expectations management is due.
Given that time is considered to be 'the same' everywhere in the universe, at least in reference frames with a relative velocity of 0, supposing we were there in a reference frame identical to ours, except for the location (so with the same relative velocity to the source of the observations,(obviously neglecting some minor gravitational effects caused by the different surroundings)), the observations would have spanned 30 years there as well.