Table of Contents
How many light years can we see from Earth?
46 billion light years
In actuality, we can see for 46 billion light years in all directions, for a total diameter of 92 billion light years.
What’s the farthest planet you can see with the naked eye?
Uranus, which has a prominent lunar system and its own rich set of rings, is the most distant naked-eye object in the Solar System. The farthest naked eye Solar System object, Uranus, is 2 hours and 40 minutes in the past.
How many light years can we travel?
It’s been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, which might lead you to expect that the farthest objects we can possibly see are 13.8 billion light-years away. But not only isn’t that true, the farthest distance we can see is more than three times as remote: 46.1 billion light-years. How can we see so far away?
How fast is a light second?
Light traveling through a vacuum moves at exactly 299,792,458 meters (983,571,056 feet) per second. That’s about 186,282 miles per second — a universal constant known in equations and in shorthand as “c,” or the speed of light.
How many light years will it take to form the Earth?
Simple math gives this answer handily as 8 billion light years if you travel 8 billion years at light speed. If you look back you can watch the events unfold after you reached light speed. If you instantly cross 8 billion light years and look back, you might see the place where the Earth will form in about 3 billion years.
How many light years can we see?
But 13.8 billion light years is far too small to be the right answer. In actuality, we can see for 46 billion light years in all directions, for a total diameter of 92 billion light years.
How far back in space can we see the universe?
Therefore, the longer we wait, the farther we can see, as light travels in a straight line at the speed of light. So after 13.8 billion years, you’d expect to be able to see back almost 13.8 billion light years, subtracting only how long it took stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang.
Is 92 billion light years big enough?
And so 92 billion light years might seem like a large number for a 13.8 billion year old Universe, but it’s the right number for the Universe we have today, full of matter, radiation, dark energy, and obeying the laws of General Relativity.