How long would it take to get from one side of our sun, the milky way galaxy, our solar system, any size red giant, and any size nebula to the other at the speed of light?
208026
A) Galaxy, about 100,000 years.\n\nB) Sun, about 5 seconds\n\nC) Solar System, it depends on if you mean the orbit of Pluto or all the way out to the Oort cloud.
224394
Right now, we're not even close to faster-than-light (or FTL) travel.  All out traveling has to be done at less than the speed of light, so most stars are farther away than we can get to.  Even at half the speed of light (which is far faster than we can travel) it would take 8 years to reach the nearest star, not counting the Sun.  (Not to mention 8 more years to get home afterward!)  Nothing can move faster than the speed of light, so our best hope is to do just like they do on Star-Trek.  The found a way to bend spacetime to get to distant stars without actually moving through normal space, which had less of a curve.  Nobody has any idea how to do that now, so we just have to keep expanding our understanding of science until we do.  Until then, I think our best bet on meeting intelligent extraterrestrial life is to hope for them to come to us!
5722
Light travels roughly 186,000 miles per second. Einstein once said that nothing can move faster than light, and this previously was an accepted truth because visible light was considered to be just a wave of energy. However, when studying how light reacts to strong gravitational pulls, such as one from a black hole, we can see that it bends under gravity. This indicates that it shares some characteristics with matter. It could even have a minute amount of mass. If light shares characterisitcs with matter, then we can harness it and use it the same way we do air in a jet engine. Can we not go faster than the wind naturally blows with a jet engine? Yes. Then I do not see why we can't go faster than light when harnessing light itself as energy.  There have been several questions like this, and I really feel that traveling faster than lightspeed is only decades away.
234573
u might have heard abt latitudes. Sun light constantly falls on earth. as earth moves different past of earth receives light and this is what we term as day and night. Latitudes help in determining times and it takes 15mins for sun to pass from one latitide to another. In other words we have time zones ever heard of green whtch time zone. This way, time is calculated with respect to sunrise and sunset. \n\nThus its all depending on how sunlight reaches in ur region..!
272977
Someone just added an extra "e" in it.\n\nOur Solar System is in a Galaxy called the Milky Way. The Milky Way comprises stars and other material lying within a galactic plane. Relative to the celestial equator, the Milky Way passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth's equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic relative to the galactic plane.\n\nThe fact that the Milky Way divides the night sky into two roughly equal hemispheres indicates that the solar system lies close to the galactic plane.\n\nThe main disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000 light years in diameter, about 250-300 thousand light years in circumference, and outside the Galactic core, about 1,000 light years in thickness. It is composed of 200 to 400 billion stars.
186125
The speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second (or 1,079,252,848.8  km·h-1, which is approximately 186,282.397 miles per second, or 670,616,629.4 miles per hour).
17865
No. We would know about it in Eight Minutes. If you think about it, the only way we even know that the Sun is there is by the heat and light that the Sun emits. If it blew up, we would feel the heat of the explosion (heat is slower than light), pieces would fly at us (in a nova ALMOST the speed of light, but not quite), and there would be a burst of light and then darkness (at the speed of light-8 min.) The pieces flying towards us would be getting closer at nearly the speed of light, and they would be emitting light, but light cannot travel faster than light, so it would still take eight minues. Even if we had a thermometer or camera right next to the Sun, radioing back information constantly, those radio waves only travel at the speed of light. Eight minutes.
577271
Hi Itsverystrange\n\nIt is actually true that distant galaxies can (and are) travelling away from us at apparently greater than the speed of light.  Any galaxies outside our Hubble volume (r = c/H) are apparently receding from us at greater than c - this is why they're outside our past light cone.  \n\nThere's no conflict with special relativity here because SRT is a strictly local theory.  The coordinate system itself is doing the expanding, the galaxies aren't moving with respect to their local coordinates.\n\nHope this helps!\nThe Chicken
20887
The Earth rotates on its axis at 1000 miles per hour (1600 kph). It orbits around the Sun at an average speed of around 67,250 miles per hour (107,600 kph). The Sun, in turn, is orbiting around the centre of the galaxy at a speed of 540,000 miles per hour. So the combined speed through space of the Earth and the Sun is 607,250 miles per hour. But there´s more - our Galaxy is also hurtling through space at a speed of 360,000 miles per hour. The combined motion of the Earth, Sun and Galaxy means that we are about twenty three and a quarter million miles away from where we were in space this time yesterday.\n\n  The Solar Sytem is believed to be about 4.5 billion years old but it's constituent parts were undoubtedly moving even before that. It is predicted\nthat our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy in, roughly, 5 billion years.
362454
In metric units, c is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second (1,079,252,848.8 km/h). Note that this speed is a definition, not a measurement, since the fundamental SI unit of length, the metre, has been defined since October 21, 1983 in terms of the speed of light: one metre is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Converted to imperial units, the speed of light is approximately 186,282.397 miles per second, or 670,616,629.384 miles per hour, or almost one foot per nanosecond.\n\nand everything about speech of light in this site\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
37677
Your thinking is correct! There's a phrase that's unfortunately left out when we read about the universe -- "observable universe." We see a galaxy 13-billion light years distant as it was 13-billion years ago. During the 13-billion years it took light from there to reach us, that galaxy has moved beyond the limits of the "observable universe." Remember, the farther away a distant galaxy is when we observe it, the faster it's rushing away.\n\nIn the case of the galaxy 13-billion light years away, it's recessional velocity is 3^11 km/sec. That's NOW. But in the 13-billion years it's taken light to get here, that same galaxy has moved another 1.2^16 light years farther away, and that puts it well beyond the limits of the "observable universe."
257125
A bunch of experts (astronomers, biologists, etc.) once met to answer your question in Greenbank, West Virginia in the 1960s.  They only concerned themselves with life in the Milky Way.  They developed a formula, sometimes called the "Drake Equation".  Depending on the numbers you place in the seven variables of the equation, you can come up with answers that range from "a million" down to "one" as the answer.
53202
I believe that warp speed is supposed to be significantly faster than the speed of light (given that they sometimes consider three light years a minor detour), and it's not possible to go faster than the speed of light.  The concept of manipulating space in such a way that they can essentially create worm holes it less unrealistic, but is still purely science fiction.
35380
A light year (or light-year, or lightyear), abbreviated ly, is the distance light travels in one year: about 9.461  × 1015 metres (9.461 petametres), or about 5.879 × 1012 (nearly six trillion) miles. More specifically, a light year is defined as the distance that a photon would travel, in free space and infinitely distant from any gravitational or magnetic fields, in one Julian year (365.25 days of 86,400 seconds each). Since the speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 m/s (670,616,629 mph) by the definition of metre, one light year is exactly equal to 9,460,730,472,580,800 m (5,878,625,373,184 mi).\n\nThe light year is often used to measure distances to stars: a light year is not a unit of time. In astronomy, the preferred unit of measurement for such distances is the parsec which is defined as the distance at which an object will generate one arcsecond of parallax when the observing object moved one astronomical unit perpendicular to the line of sight to the observer. This is equal to approximately 3.26 light years. The parsec is preferred because it can be more easily derived from, and inter-compared with, observational data. However, outside scientific circles, the term light year is more widely used by the general public.\n\nA light year is also equal to about 63,241.077 astronomical units (AU). For a list of lengths on the order of one light year.\n\nUnits related to the light year are the light minute and light second, the distance light travels in a vacuum in one minute and one second, respectively. A light minute is equal to 17,987,547,480 m. Since light travels 299,792,458 m in one second, a light second is 299,792,458 m in length.\n\n\nMiscellaneous facts\nIt takes 8.3 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (a distance of 1.58 × 10-5 light years). \nThe most distant space probe, Voyager 1, was 13 light hours (only 1.5 × 10-3 light years) away from Earth in September 2004. It took Voyager 27 years to cover that distance. \nThe nearest known star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away. \nThe center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 28,000 light years away. The Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. \nThe Triangulum Galaxy (M33), at a bit under 2.6 million light years away, is the most distant object visible to the naked eye. \nThe nearest large galaxy cluster, the Virgo Cluster, is about 60 million light years away. \nThe particle horizon (observable part) of the universe has a radius of about 46 billion light years, but light from the edge of the observable universe was emitted only 13.7 billion years ago (the age of the universe). The figures differ because distant objects have continued to recede from us due to cosmological expansion. \nOne gigaparsec is equal to approximately 3.26 billion light years.
178662
We are developing technolgies at a rapid rate e.g. computational power increases by almost a factor of 1000 every 5 years. However, I dont think we can achieve faster than light speed travel in 50 years (partly because its not physically possible, according to Einstein) We would need a great deal of energy, as someone mentioned before, the power of a 100 suns. We are currently a Type 0 civilization, harnessing our energy requirements from fossil fuels. It would take a lot more than 50 years to achieve near to light speed travel.\n\nHowever, there are concepts which have been put forward that are a step ahead in space travel, like the Hydrogen Ramjet. This vehicle can possibly travel at 30% of the speed of light although it requires a miracle in terms of engineering
327739
It takes 4 years for the light to reach Earth, so that means the star is 4 light-years away from Earth.\n\nA light year is 5,878,625,373,183 and 849/1397 miles, so multiply that by 4, and you get...\n\nabout 23,514,501,492,734.4309 miles.\n\n\nAnd if you're using the metric system, a light year is 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters, so multiply that by 4, and you get...\n\n37,842,921,890,323,200 meters.\n\nHope this helps.
539199
Galaxies are huge clusters of billions of stars.  Smaller hunks of stars are called "clusters"  -- but once they get really _REALLY_ big, they're called galaxies. \n\nSolar systems are systems of planets and other hunks of rock orbiting a SINGLE STAR...   so, the Earth and the other planets are part of OUR solar system,  orbiting the sun.  Other suns have OTHER solar systems where DIFFERENT planets are orbiting. \n\nThe speed of light is REALLY REALLY FAST. \n\nIf you turn on a light on the moon, no one on earth will see the light for almost two seconds because it took the light that long to get here. \n\nBut the speed of light is _SO FAST_ that even going from New York to Las Angeles, all the way across the United States it only takes about two one-hundredths of a second to get there (0.016 seconds) \n\nThis shows two things, the moon is a LONG ways away,and light is VERY VERY FAST.  The speed of light is 186000 (one hundred and eighty six thousand) miles per second.  A rifle bullet travels only around two to three thousand miles per hour.  So, light is two hundred thousand  times faster than a speeding bullet.  Really REALLY fast.