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If you're not feeling like a speck of insignificant dust yet...

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Basil

Basil

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Maybe this will help:

This is kind of mind-blowing. Voyager 1 was launched in September of 1977. Since then it has been traveling at 38,000 miles per hour. On November 13th of next year (2026), it will have traveled only 1 light-day from earth (the distance light travels in one day).

So it will have been traveling 38,000 MPH for 49 years just to travel 1 light-day. (to be fair, it's initial speed was somewhat less but it has gained some due to the effects of One “light year” would be 365 times farther, so it will take voyager another 17 thousand eight hundred and thirty six more years to travel just one light year.

The nearest star to us (besides the sun) is Proxima Centauri, about 4.24 light-years away. So Voyager would need to keep traveling for 75,634 more years just to reach the distance of the nearest star. Kinda give you an appreciation for how unbelievably huge the universe is. The edge of the "observable" universe in may billions of light years away. Our little blue ball is but a speck of dust.
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And any stars that we 'see' now, could die in a super nova and we would not observe it in our lifetimes.
They could already have been gone to dust and we are just looking at the light now.
 
equiprx said:
And any stars that we 'see' now, could die in a super nova and we would not observe it in our lifetimes.
They could already have been gone to dust and we are just looking at the light now.
Click to expand...
Betelgeuse is said to be close to going super nove, but given its distance from us, it may have done so centuries ago but we won't know it any time soon. If we did see it go super now, it means it would have actually gone suer hundreds of years ago.
 
 
Basil said:
Betelgeuse is said to be close to going super nove, but given its distance from us, it may have done so centuries ago but we won't know it any time soon. If we did see it go super now, it means it would have actually gone suer hundreds of years ago.
Click to expand...
Last I heard they discovered it was a binary star.
That was causing the apparent 'bulge', so "never mind".
 
equiprx said:
Last I heard they discovered it was a binary star.
That was causing the apparent 'bulge', so "never mind".
Click to expand...
And also read that, in addition to possibly being a binary, it might be a huge dust/debris cloud that is orbiting it... and that might account for the pulsations (as opposed to near nova).
Anyway, I find it amazing that the star is something like less than 10M years old; that's crazy young!
 
Boink said:
And also read that, in addition to possibly being a binary, it might be a huge dust/debris cloud that is orbiting it... and that might account for the pulsations (as opposed to near nova).
Anyway, I find it amazing that the star is something like less than 10M years old; that's crazy young!
Click to expand...
I say we take a road trip to Betelgeuse and see for ourselves!
 
That's going to require a very big credit card limit for the gas.
 
Here's a pleasant thought ...

Considering the great distances from us to "out there", isn't it possible that most of the Universe has already disappeared, and we don't know it?

Just wanted to cheer everybody up.
 
Ever wonder what is out there beyond what we can see? Just think, one light year is 5.88 trillion miles! Hard to comprehend. 🤔
 
PAUL161 said:
Ever wonder what is out there beyond what we can see? Just think, one light year is 5.88 trillion miles! Hard to comprehend. 🤔
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And speaking of seeing... one can only see about 3,000 stars on a really good night (with the naked eye)... and ALL of those (in all directions) are in our local area in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.
 
Boink said:
And speaking of seeing... one can only see about 3,000 stars on a really good night (with the naked eye)... and ALL of those (in all directions) are in our local area in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.
Click to expand...
Another thing I learned about a year ago, since I started to do more astronomy:
I assumed that our solar system should be spinning near the same plane as the Milky Way.
When I was observing the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, I thought there was a discrepancy.
I spoke to an Astronomy Professor who said we are 60° off our kilter.
 
equiprx said:
Another thing I learned about a year ago, since I started to do more astronomy:
I assumed that our solar system should be spinning near the same plane as the Milky Way.
When I was observing the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, I thought there was a discrepancy.
I spoke to an Astronomy Professor who said we are 60° off our kilter.
Click to expand...
Yep. Still amazes me that although we see a Milky Way streak across the sky, ALL of the others stars (off axis) are just our nearby neighbors.
The ONLY really distant thing anyone can see with the naked eye is the Andromeda Galaxy (which is difficult) and it is 2 MILLION light-years away.
 
equiprx said:
Another thing I learned about a year ago, since I started to do more astronomy:
I assumed that our solar system should be spinning near the same plane as the Milky Way.
When I was observing the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, I thought there was a discrepancy.
I spoke to an Astronomy Professor who said we are 60° off our kilter.
Click to expand...
Only 60° off kilter? Seems like more than that.
 
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Douglas Adams
 
Boink said:
The ONLY really distant thing anyone can see with the naked eye is the Andromeda Galaxy (which is difficult) and it is 2 MILLION light-years away.
Click to expand...

I thought that too, but there are others. All depends on how dark your sky is.
One galaxy is within the body of Ursa Major. I'm just now learning at 78.
Messier (ca 1764) found 110 with only a 100 mm telescope.
He was looking for comets and the 110 are what he eliminated, but he didn't know what they were.
 
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