Some Milky Way Galaxy Facts & Figures
All the stars that you can see with the naked eye belong to our own galaxy - the Milky Way Galaxy. You cannot see stars from other galaxies because they are too far away, and in the vast void between galaxies there are no stars apart from a very few "rogues" that have escaped or been ejected from a galaxy.
In an outer lying arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, our sun circles the Galaxy's center once every 230 million years, traveling at 220 km/sec
There are at least 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And here is an idea of its size. For light from the center of our galaxy to reach our solar system, it takes about 27,000 years, so what you see of our galaxy today is really how it looked 27,000 years ago.
To travel from one side of our galaxy to the other would take 200,000 years traveling at the speed of light. This is only one galaxy - there are billions more galaxies.
The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are approaching each other with a combined speed of 300,000 miles per hour (200 km's per second).
Recent measurements of variations in the universe's background radiation indicate that the Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxies are moving through space at 375 miles per second (1.3 million miles per hour), and still accelerating.
About 30 billion stars in our galaxy are roughly "Sun-like", and astronomers guess that between 5 and 90 percent of those have planets like Jupiter. So there might be between 1.5 and 27 billion Jupiter-like planets in our galaxy. There may be many more smaller planets also.
If the Sun is taken as a fixed point, then all the humans on Earth are moving at about 66,660 miles per hour (107,320 km/hr) as the Earth follows its orbit. If the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is a fixed point, then the solar system is moving at about 500,000 miles per hour (800,000 km/hr) in its orbit around the galaxy. From an even broader reference point, our entire local group of galaxies is moving at about one million miles per hour toward another galaxy group called the Virgo Cluster.
The nearest star to us (not including the Sun) is Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 25 trillion miles, or 4.3 light-years away.
The speed of light at 186,000 miles a second, is generally believed to be the fastest velocity possible. Even at that speed, when contemplating galactic, or inter-galactic journeys, traveling at the speed of light is next to useless given the huge distances involved. To travel to our nearest neighbour galaxy, Andromeda - M31, even if travel at light speed was possible, would require some 2.9 million years.
It is extremely difficult to define the age at which the Milky Way Galaxy was formed, but the age of the oldest stars in the Galaxy are now estimated to be about 13.6 billion years, nearly as old as the Universe itself. |
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}