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How far do you have to go to be in the Milky Way galaxy?
about 48,000 light-years
We’d need to go much further to escape the ‘halo’ of diffuse gas, old stars and globular clusters that surrounds the Milky Way’s stellar disk. Finally, if we wanted to go far enough to see our entire Galaxy in all its glory, we’d need to travel about 48,000 light-years vertically.
What is the height of the Milky Way galaxy?
That of the Milky Way is thought to have a scale height of around 300–400 parsecs (980–1,300 ly) in the vertical axis perpendicular to the disk, and a scale length of around 2.5–4.5 kiloparsecs (8.2–14.7 kly) in the horizontal axis, in the direction of the radius.
How long would it take to travel across the Milky Way even if you were going the speed of light?
At 17.3 km/s, it would take Voyager over1,700,000,000 years to traverse the entire length of the Milky Way. Even traveling at the speed of light, it would take nearly a hundred thousand years!
How many light years would it take to cross the Milky Way?
200,000 years
The disk of our home galaxy – the Milky Way – is bigger than we previously thought. A new study shows it would take 200,000 years for a spaceship traveling at the speed of light to go across the entire galaxy.
How far would it take to travel across the Milky Way galaxy?
We’d need to go much further to escape the ‘halo’ of diffuse gas, old stars and globular clusters that surrounds the Milky Way’s stellar disk. Finally, if we wanted to go far enough to see our entire Galaxy in all its glory, we’d need to travel about 48,000 light-years vertically.
Is the Sun at the center of the Milky Way galaxy?
The Sun does not lie near the center of our Galaxy. It lies about 8 kpc from the center on what is known as the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. Parallaxes give us distances to stars up to perhaps a few thousand light years. Beyond that distance, parallaxes are so small than they cannot be measured with contemporary instruments.
How long would it take to travel to the edge of space?
A trip at light speed to the very edge of our solar system – the farthest reaches of the Oort Cloud, a collection of dormant comets way, way out there – would take about 1.87 years. Keep going to Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighboring star, and plan on arriving in 4.25 years at light speed.
What is the Milky Way made of?
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a disk of stars about 100,000 light-years across, and about 1,000 light-years thick. The Sun is situated about halfway from the centre and is near the middle of the disk in the vertical direction.