Table of Contents
How long would it take to travel from one side of the Milky Way galaxy to the other?
200,000 years
If you could ride a light beam from one side of the disk to the other, it would take 200,000 years to span the distance. If you could drive across and averaged 60 miles an hour, it would take more than 2 trillion years.
How long would it take us to get to the nearest galaxy in light-years?
To get to the closest galaxy to ours, the Canis Major Dwarf, at Voyager’s speed, it would take approximately 749,000,000 years to travel the distance of 25,000 light years! If we could travel at the speed of light, it would still take 25,000 years!
How many light-years across is the Milky Way galaxy?
million light-years
Our galaxy is a whole lot bigger than it looks. New work finds that the Milky Way stretches nearly 2 million light-years across, more than 15 times wider than its luminous spiral disk.
How many light-years away is Andromeda?
2.537 million light years
Andromeda Galaxy/Distance to Earth
Excluding the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, visible from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, the Andromeda galaxy is the brightest external galaxy you can see. At 2.5 million light-years, it’s the most distant thing humans can see with the unaided eye. Astronomers sometimes call this galaxy Messier 31, or M31.
How far away is the nearest black hole?
1,500 light-years
Now, astronomers have discovered a black hole with just three times the mass of the sun, making it one of the smallest found to date—and it happens to be the closest known black hole, at just 1,500 light-years from Earth.
How much longer will the sun last?
It still has about 5,000,000,000—five billion—years to go. When those five billion years are up, the Sun will become a red giant.
How long would it take to travel one light year?
It would take you little under 20,000 years, to travel just 1 light-year. Let’s say that you want to travel to Kepler 438b, which is over 400 light-years away.
How far would we need to travel to leave our galaxy?
The Sun is situated about halfway from the centre and is near the middle of the disk in the vertical direction. So, to leave our Galaxy, we would have to travel about 500 light-years vertically, or about 25,000 light-years away from the galactic centre.
Which is the closest galaxy to the speed of light?
Thank you for you greatly, appreciated, time. The closest galaxy is the recently discovered Canis Major dwarf galaxy, which is “only” 25,000 light-years away. So it would take 25,000 years to get there if you traveled at the speed of light. Actually, that’s the amount of time it would take from the perspective of the outside world.
How many miles per second is the speed of light?
Put another way, a light year is how far you’d travel in a year if you could travel at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second. (By the way, you can’t travel at the speed of light, as far as we know, but that’s a whole other story…)