on tonals and naguals a journey back in time through my mind

Monday, May 22, 2006

a few words on the speed of light!

It takes 8.3 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (a distance of 1.58 × 10-5 light years).
The 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.
The nearest known
star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.
The
center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 26,000 light years away. The Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.
The
Triangulum Galaxy (M33), at a bit under 2.6 million light years away, is the most distant object visible to the naked eye.
The nearest large
galaxy cluster, the Virgo Cluster, is about 60 million light years away.
The
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 (see Hubble's law).
One
gigaparsec is equal to approximately 3.26 billion light years.

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