How many miles long is the Milky Way galaxy?

How many miles long is the Milky Way galaxy?

The approximate diameter is 14.6 million miles (23.5 million kilometers) . By comparison, the Milky Way itself is roughly 100,000 light-years wide and 1,000 light-years thick. A huge disk of gas around Sagittarius A* billows out as far as 5 to 30 light-years from the supermassive black hole.

How long would it take to travel the Milky Way?

Even if you could travel at the speed of light (300,000 kilometers, or 186,000 miles, per second), it would take you about 25,000 years to reach the middle of the Milky Way. If we could travel outside our galaxy and look back, this is what our Milky Way Galaxy might look like from above.

How big is the Milky Way galaxy compared to Earth?

Answer: Assuming a diameter for the Milky Way galaxy of about 15 kpc, which is about 4.6×10^(17) km, and a diameter for the Earth of about 12756 km, the ratio of the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy to that of the Earth is about 3.6×10^(13).

How far is the center of the Milky Way from Earth?

The new map suggests that the center of the Milky Way, and the black hole which sits there, is located 25,800 light-years from Earth. This is closer than the official value of 27,700 light-years adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1985.

Where does space end?

No, they don’t believe there’s an end to space. However, we can only see a certain volume of all that’s out there. Since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, light from a galaxy more than 13.8 billion light-years away hasn’t had time to reach us yet, so we have no way of knowing such a galaxy exists.

Can we leave the Milky Way?

The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity’s present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction. However, theoretically speaking, there is nothing to conclusively indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible.

Is the space infinite?

There’s a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn’t existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding).

How far is the end of space?

So the furthest out we can see is about 46.5 billion light years away, which is crazy, but it also means you can look back into the past and try to figure out how the universe formed, which again, is what cosmologists do.

How far is the closest black hole?

This illustration provided by NOIRLab in November 2022 depicts the closest black hole to Earth and its sun-like companion star. Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, just 1,600 light-years away. Scientists reported Friday that this black hole is 10 times more massive than our sun.

How many universes are there?

In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16.

What is beyond the universe?

The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.

How many humans could fit in the Earth?

An average middle-class American consumes 3.3 times the subsistence level of food and almost 250 times the subsistence level of clean water. So if everyone on Earth lived like a middle class American, then the planet might have a carrying capacity of around 2 billion.

How many black holes are in the Milky Way?

Astronomers estimate that 100 million black holes roam among the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but they have never conclusively identified an isolated black hole.

What is the closest black hole to Earth?

Gaia BH1 is the closest black hole to Earth that scientists have ever discovered. It is approximately three times closer to Earth than the previous record holder. By looking at the behavior of a star near the black hole, astronomers could determine the black hole was there, despite never seeing it directly.

Is there a black hole in our galaxy?

Sagittarius A* is our own private supermassive black hole, the still point around which our galaxy revolves. Black holes trap everything that falls in, including light, so they are, in a very real sense, unseeable.

Is the Milky Way infinite?

Every location in the universe has its own sphere of observation beyond which it cannot see. Since our observable universe is not infinite, it has an edge.

How many miles away is the end of the Milky Way?

It is estimated that the edge of the Milky Way lies about 950,000 light years away from the galactic center while the Earth lies about 26,670 light years away from the galactic center. Therefore, the Earth lies about 923,330lightyears away from the edge of the Milky Way.

How long would it take to get to Andromeda at the speed of light?

Although it may be one of the closest galaxies to our own, since the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years distant it would take 2.5 million years to get there if (and it’s a huge ‘if’) we could travel at the speed of light.

How many light years away is the Milky Way?

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. 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.