"travel ahead of time"

Your friend has a romantic view of light. When light leaves from, say our sun for example, it takes seven minutes to get here. It's not 'time-traveling' it's just seven minutes old light by the time you see it. With stars it is true that they can have been destroyed by the time their light reaches us (because they're years away, not minutes like our sun). However it's like this: If someone throws a baseball at you then spontaneously combusts, the baseball is still moving in air towards you, regardless of how the person who threw it exploded and no longer exists.

I read that it takes sunlight eight minutes to reach us, and it's kind of funny to think about because when you go out you instantly feel the warmth from the sun. But yeah, if a star blows up, we won't be able to "see" it until millions of years later, because that's when the light from the star's explosion will come close enough to our planet for scientists to see in space using telescopes or orbits or whatever. If you think about it, everything in space is so far away, and what we're seeing might be the past because it takes so many years for something so far away to be able to become visible to us. But as for stars, I'm not sure. I think when you see a star in the sky, you're actually really seeing it since it's still, whereas with a star that exploded, it'll take time for the light of that star to come closer to us.

Time travel 101 : The rate of time changes with aceleration or gravity. It slows. If you are going near the speed of light, your rate of time is slow compared to the rest of the world. When you come back to the rest of the world time, more time has passed than your time. You are in the future. Light: What we really see is not objects. We see light. The colors of objects seen are the colors of the spectrum not absorbed by the object. Neat, huh? Light coming from galaxies millions of light years away is millions of years old. We are seeing millions of years in the past.