re: Could this be the first direct image of an exoplanet?

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How many generations would it take to get there?

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Depends on how you travel. 1200 light years is extremely close compared with many other stars but extremely far away for us.

If you could get a ship going up to near light speed then time slows down for the travelers. Go fast enough and they could arrive within their own lifetimes. Hell they could go there and come back within their own lifetimes. But over 2400 years would have passed here on Earth.

It's the same effect as was shown in the movie "Interstellar" although there the effect was triggered by being deep in a powerful gravity well. Time dilation is experimentally verified to be real though.

Edit: One of several ways that it's been verified is to take a bunch of radioactive nuclei with a known and very short half-life. Use a particle accelerator to get them going very very fast. Measure their half life, which turns out to be much longer. The difference is as Einstein predicted.