Submitted by bol-nooney22 t3_11wvgtm in askscience
I’m struggling to wrap my head around the physics for this??… Take andromeda for example. The galaxy is roughly 2,000,000 light years away and 110,000 in diameter. If the light at the nearest part of the galaxy took 110,000 light years less time to reach us than the furthest part and the galaxy has moved through the universe in that time then wouldn’t its shape be distorted?
blargerer t1_jd1tird wrote
They are distorted. Its just a very minor effect. Take your Andromeda numbers, the 110000 difference would be between the front and back, but that wouldn't be a visible distortion because it would be along the axis of vision. if you look at the difference in time between the center and the edges, you get something like sqr( 55000 ) + sqr( 2000000 ) = 4,003,025,000,000, √( 4003025000000 ) ÷ 2000000 =1.00037805353776129308527162 so the light on the edge would be .03% older.