The United States' 250th birthday is right around the corner and what better way to celebrate than by looking for a star whose light began its journey to Earth around the time the Declaration of Independence was signed?
Starlight travels through the near-perfect vacuum of space at a staggering 186,282 miles (299,791 kilometers) per second — or the speed of light. Even at this pace, it can take hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years for starlight to reach its destination, rendering each point of light in the night sky a twinkling time capsule, which represents a snapshot in the life of a star encoded at the moment the radiation left its source.
