• Question: How long would it take to get to the milkyway?

    Asked by Kayleigh Corbin to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Julian on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Not long at all, we are part of the Milky Way. We are somewhat out from the centre.
      If we wanted to go to the centre of the Milky Way, its is about 27,000 light years away, so even shining a laser at it would take 27,000 years to get there. As we haven’t got rockets that can go anywhere near that speed, its probably too far to visit!

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      We’re in it! 😀 The bit that you see in the sky (on a very clear night, somewhere dark) is just the rest of the Milky Way – as we’re looking towards the centre of it. It looks kind of fuzzy because that’s the light from all the other stars (hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone) mixed in with gas and dust. If you were somewhere exceptionally dark, away from all the cities, you’d be able to actually see darker patches – these are what we call dust lanes. As Julian says, we live in one of the outer spiral arms, and so we don’t actually know what the Milky Way looks like exactly because we’re inside of it! We have to just do our best to figure it out from the bits we can see.

Comments