das_hips Wrote:I feel really small, and unimportant to anything. Oh well... I got my beer and my Hip...
Hahaha...you think you feel small now, well check
this out:
This is one of the most distant images obtained from Hubble:
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(click on the thumbnail image in the right-hand column for a larger, more detailed image).
Astronomers estimate that some of the galaxies in this picture may be 13 BILLION light-years away. The picture shows these galaxies as they looked 13 billion years ago, since the light that creates the image has been travelling though space for the last 13 billion years and is just reaching us now. We'll never know what they look like now (well, if we're still here in 13 billion years, we'll be able to see what they look like now!)
For reference, there are approximately 6 TRILLION miles in a single light-year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and at that speed it travels 6 trillion miles in one year.
Which means the distance to these far-off galaxies is [6 trillion TIMES 13 billion] miles!
hock: If you wrote this distance out in the conventional fashion it would look like this:
78,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles!
By way of comparison, the closest star to us (other than our own of course) is Alpha Centauri, which is only 4 light years away. But even this star is so far away that if we were to travel to Alpha Centauri at a speed of 20,000 miles an hour, it would still take us over 100,000 years to arrive. And that's the closest one! :lol:
This stuff is cool... 8)
