how far?

[Bobtail4x4]

at todays stargazing club meeting, the following distances were discussed,
its mind blowing,

What's Out There ? A few Astronomical things.

Very very big numbers are impossible to understand – this may help !
Thousand = 1,000 Million = 1,000,000
Billion = 1,000,000,000 (using the now common USA definition)
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000

(The numbers quoted below here are approximate.)

The differences between Millions, Billions and Trillions is huge :-

A Million seconds = 11 DAYS. A Billion seconds = 31 YEARS. A Trillion seconds = 31,000 YEARS

A Light Year is a measurement of distance.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second
so a Light Year is 6 Trillion miles.

Astronomers also use AU (Astronomical Units) as a unit of measurement.
An AU is the approximate distance from the Earth to the Sun – 93,000,000 miles.


How long would it take at 70 miles per hour ?

To get to the Moon = 6 months
To get to the Sun = 146 years
To get to Venus = 40 years
To get to Mars = 228 years
To get to Neptune = 4,400 years
To get to the nearest Star, Proxima Centauri = 41 Million years
To get to the Pole Star = 7 Billion years


The Solar System is 4.6 Billion years old
The Universe is maybe 13.7 Billion years old

The Sun is a Star.
The Solar System is the Sun and all things orbiting around it : Planets with their Moons, also Minor Planets, Asteroids, Comets, Meteors and Dust.

A Galaxy is a discus shaped cloud of stars. The Solar System is inside the Milky Way Galaxy. When we look up and see the Milky Way arching across the sky we are looking towards the centre of the disc. All the Stars you can see with the unaided eye are in the Milky Way Galaxy.

The Milky Way is thought to have 200 to 400 Billion stars – we may never really know how many. Some Galaxies are 10 times bigger than the Milky Way.

There might be 200 Billion Galaxies in the Universe.

 

[cheb]

You might think it's a long way to the chemists, but that's just peanuts to space.

I'm always slightly boggled by the sheer quantity of stuff on earth. Consider a silk scarf. Now think of the number of silkworms needed to produce that amount of thread.

 

[frank horton]

or one idiot at the top to trash a country further...lol

 

[not done it yet]

Everything reasonably correct (apart, maybe, the units used) up to the shape of galaxies - they are not all disc-shaped like our “Milky Way” - described as such but dependent on which direction one might be observing it from our tiny insignificant spot in the Universe.

 

[8ob]

at todays stargazing club meeting, the following distances were discussed,
its mind blowing,
A Light Year is a measurement of distance.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second
so a Light Year is 6 Trillion miles.

According to oogle the average human covers about 30-50,000 miles in a lifetime. , that's three or four generations of us to cover the speed of light for a second, best take a picnic hamper if we get serious about space travel

Bob

 

[badabec]

Here we are, riding the Pale Blue Dot.

 

[not done it yet]

Watts, kiloWatts, MegaWatts, GigaWatts, TeraWatts …. P, E, Z, Y.

Watts, milliWatts, microWatts, nanoWatts, picoWatts…. f, a, z, y

It’s not just distances that range from the sublime to the ridiculous - if that is a permissible way to describe them.

I generally stop at T and p in anything electrical.