The speed of light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,000 miles per second, or 700 million miles per hour. At that speed it takes light 1.2 seconds to travel from the moon to the Earth. 8.5 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth. 5 hours 40 minutes to travel from the Sun to former planet Pluto. And 100,000 years to go from one edge of the Milky Way to the other.
The Andromeda galaxy is 2.3 million light years away from Earth. This means if you're looking at this galaxy through binoculars or the naked eye if you're in a dark area, you're looking at light that is 2.3 million years old. The Andromeda galaxy could explode right now and we would not know it for 2.3 million years. And Andromeda is close as far as galaxies are concerned. In fact, Andromeda is estimated to collide with the Milky Way in 5 billion years. So we better hurry and figure out an escape plan.
Go Back to the time it takes light to travel from one edge of the Milky Way to the other. Now imagine we have a little spaceship that can travel at the speed of light and we need to go explore all the other galaxies. Surely with our fast little spaceship it will not take long. There are only an estimated 125 billion galaxies in the Universe. We are tiny.
Trevor
No comments:
Post a Comment