You must admit that a Stareater eating stars looks a heck of a lot like Pac-man. I even mention it in the book. Well, I'm sure I can come up with more but it is intriguing, isn't it?
Entry 1-286: October 7, 2013
Real life observational time travel
In many of the descriptions of Rome's Revolution, I discuss the concept of ‘legal time travel’. This is not such a bizarre thought. We have examples of this right in front of us. The Hubble Space Telescope had an instrument called the Ultra Deep Field imager but it was later upgraded to the eXtreme Deep Field imager. It was able to capture and focus on photons that were emitted only 50 million years after the Big Bang.
This is taken directly from NASA's eXtreme Deep Field web page so I take no credit for it. Here is what they say:
The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars extraordinarily brighter than our sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a "time tunnel into the distant past." The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe's birth in the big bang.