how did we get billions of light years away from other galaxys since the big bang at only 1.4million mph?
344481
well let us take a "logical" look....the big bang says that there was nothing, then something, and now everything is expanding away.  So how did things get farther away than time has permitted?  Hmmm...kind of a hole in the theory.
327223
1 lightyear is the distance a beam of light can travel in a vacuum in one year.  Given that the speed of light is roughly 3*(10^8) meters per second, or about 670.6 million miles per hour, then 93 million miles is about 1.58*(10^-5) lightyears.  Another way to look at it, is that it takes about 7.21 minutes for light from the sun to reach earth, and they are roughly 93 million miles apart.
718580
More than that- There are objects, such as M31 galaxy and supernova, that are millions of light years away that are visible. Take a Andromeda at 2-2.5 million light years. Light goes 186,000 miles in a second..X 60 (minute) X 24 (hour) X 365 (day) = about 98 billion miles in one light year (lets just call it 100 billion).  You can see something 2.5 million light years away, so- you can see things in the night sky that are 100 billion X 2.5 million, or about 250 *quadrillion* miles away.\n\nSo, to answer your question- with the naked eye, you can see things at least 250 quadrillion miles away.  Thats 250 million billion miles.\n\nWow...thanks for asking that question-that was fun and interesting\n\n*edit* by the way, Ronin is wrong-the M31 galaxy (Andromeda) that can be seen with the naked eye is only 2 million light years away- as stated, only supernova are bright enough to see past that
725562
The essence of the Big Bang theory is pretty simple:  sometime billions of years ago the universe began;  everything now in the universe was created from energy/matter that was compacted into a really, really small volume/space, and indeed that really, really small volume/space was all there was to the universe at that moment; and since the universe began, it's been expanding.  These are the essential points of the theory.  Over time, we've added new details, such as pinning down the age of the universe to within a few hundred million years (last I heard, we thought it was 13.7 +/- 0.2 billion years old).  And a lot of theoretical and observational work have gone into investigating and refining the theory.\n\nAs to why we think that there was a Big Bang instead of, say, a universe which had always existed or a universe which came into being pretty much fully formed, the main reason and the reason we started thinking there was a Big Bang in the first place is because of very peculiar observations that we can make of distant galaxies.  This observation is that, except for a bunch galaxies which are both nearby and gravitationally bound to our own galaxy, all the galaxies we can see are moving away from both our galaxy and all other galaxies.  Also, the speed with which a galaxy is moving away from us depends directly on how far away from us it is (e.g. galaxies farther away from us are moving away from us faster than galaxies which are closer).  And the reason we first infered a Big Bang from this is that if you imagine running this movement backwards, doing a cosmic rewind if you will, then all the galaxies will be moving back towards each other, and eventually will all find themselves in the same place.\n\nSeveral years after this observation, a key predicition of the Big Bang theory was verified.  When the universe was young, it was also really hot and so for a time would have given off light all its own (I'm simplifying things a bit, but these are the essential facts as we know them).  It was predicted that some of this light should still be around.  And, lo and behold, at the very same time that people were making this prediction and beginning to think of looking for it, practically right down the road some experimentalists stumbled upon it accidentally.\n\nSo, in short and hopefully simple words, that's what the Big Bang is and why we think it happened.
301811
It doesn't work that way. Because the universe is still expanding, if you were to stand still at one edge of the universe, you would see the opposite edge traveling away from you at FASTER than the speed of light. (That's one of the peculiar thing about quasars ... they're so far away that the expansion of space between that location and this location makes them appear to be traveling faster than lightspeed.)\n\nSo how far from one side of the universe to the other? Too late! It's already changed! How about now? Too late again! It's already ... and so on.
433526
It is not as simple as saying we are moving away from other galaxies.  On average all galaxies are moving away from each other.  Admittedly there are some that move towards each other, like the Andromeda galaxy which is coming straight towards us!!!\n\nThe reason why the expansion of the Universe appears to be accelerating and not slowing is still theoretical.  It is thought to have something to do with a theoretical force known as "anti-gravity".  As you can tell by the name, it has the opposite effect of the normal everday gravity that we experience -  the type that keeps our feet firmly on the ground.  Dark energy, again is theoretical, and could have the properties of anti-gravity, but this is all speculation as it has yet to have been discovered.
51985
We can view quite a distance away (measured in light years) from our own solar system using the latest generation of telescopes and probes but we have not even yet begun to exit from our own solar system. Even the distance needed to escape our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is beyond our capability as of yet. We do not even know most of the fundamental questions pertaining the formation and existance of the galaxy such as dark matter. Our knowledge of the outer solar system stems from mostly interpretations of photos sent back by probes such as Voyager and the Hubble Telescope as well as the never generation of scanning tools but that is all for now. Other phenomenons we can speculate and conjecture using maths such as the existance of black holes. Maybe one day we may venture farther away but with problems even for a manned flight reaching Mars, that time will be long away indeed and it may never be possible to ever reach the outer limit of what we know as space for it is light years away and even now conjecture is whether there really is an outer limit to our universe as it is still expanding. As for other galaxies there are many abound ours is only one of millions, there are examples like the Crab Nebula etc.
67634
Despite the large amount of knowledge we now have about the Andromeda Galaxy, its distance, though among the best known intergalactic distances, is not really well-known. While it is well established that M31 is about 15-16 times further away than the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the absolute value of this measure is still uncertain, and in current sources, usually given between 2.4 and 2.9 million light-years - a consequence of the uncertainty in the LMC distance and thus the overall intergalactic distance scale. E.g., the semi-recent correction from data by ESA's astrometrical satellite Hipparcos has pushed this value up by more than 10 percent, from about 2.4-2.5 to the about 2.9 million light-years we use here.
832530
Here are the facts.\n\n1. The closest Galaxy is the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy\n2. The Canis Major Dwarf galaxy is 42,000 light years away.\n3. Traveling in a conventional space craft would take   \n    approx   4,927,184,640,000 years at 50,000 mi/hour\n4. Using light sails (a cutting edge untested technology)\n    a craft could travel as fast as 25% the speed of light.\n5. At 25% the speed of light it would take 168,000 Earth years to\n    reach the Canis Major dwarf.
631594
Our goal was to drastically slow down light, which travels through empty space at the universe's ultimate speed limit of nearly 300,000 kilometers a second. We saw the first sign of light pulses slowing down in March 1998. As happens so often in experimental physics--because it can take so many hours to get all the components working together for the first time--this occurred in the wee hours of the morning, at 4 A.M. By July we were down to airplane speed. At that time I had to go to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen to teach a class. I remember sitting in the plane marveling that I was traveling "faster than light";--that I could beat one of our slow pulses to Denmark by a full hour.
1169257
Basically the distance a galaxy is away from the center of the universe and its mass help to determine its age. Not sure how acurate it is.\n I guess it depends on if you accept the Big Bang theory. Also, there is much work that is still left to be done on the Standard Model.\n One problem could be trying to take information gathered in a few hundred years and comparing it to something billions of years old.
694313
it's just the way we observe galaxies moving away from each other.  The further out from each other they are, the faster away from each other they move.\n\nFrom this and by analysing measures done on large numbers of galaxies, and then by taking these velocities and distances but plugging in older times in the data, it was found that, well, at some point back in time, all that stuff must have been concentrated at one point.\n\nAs the quality of experimental data improved, the Big Bang was the only theory that survived.\n\nBut in the early days, it was far from the only proposed model, so it is not at all, as you seem to believe, that physicists decided that you had to "build with explosions" ;-)\n\n\nhope this helps
383249
The Hubble Space Telescope can see out to a distance of several billions of light-years. A light-year is the distance that light travels in 1 year. Since light has a speed of 186,000 miles per second (light can travel about 7 times around the entire earth in 1 second!), light travels about 5,865,696,000,000 miles in just one year. You can attach 9 more zeros to the end of this to get 1 billion light-years and another one for 10 billion light-years. The farthest that Hubble has seen so far is about 10-15 billion light-years away. The farthest area looked at is called the Hubble Deep Field.
246954
97 million light years
522026
Excuse me, @@ ljdynamique2???\n\nTraveling at the speed of light IS possible. I, personally, have never seen light just "mosey" along on its way. \n\nAnd there is not one shred of evidence that life does not exist in other galaxies. In fact, all experts consider it more than likely that there is.
491273
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!
384787
The universe is curently about 156 billion light years across, expanding at a rate of 71(+/-4) kilometers per second per megaparsec. Current observations dictate that this rate is accelerating.  So we will go on, and on, and on for eternity