Confirmed exoplanet detections (made by Kepler and other telescopes, both in space and on the ground) now come to more than 4,000 – and that’s from looking at only tiny slices of our galaxy. In our galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, this pushes the number of planets potentially into the trillions. Realistically, we’re most likely talking about multi-planet systems rather than just single planets. Another galaxy, IC 1101, spans as much as 4 million light-years.īased on observations by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, we can confidently predict that every star you see in the sky probably hosts at least one planet. Our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, for example, is some 220,000 light-years wide. That sounds huge, and it is, at least until we start comparing it to other galaxies.
Our galaxy probably contains 100 to 400 billion stars, and is about 100,000 light-years across. Groups of them are bound into clusters of galaxies, and these into superclusters the superclusters are arranged in immense sheets stretching across the universe, interspersed with dark voids and lending the whole a kind of spiderweb structure. Based on the deepest images obtained so far, it’s one of about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Our galaxy is a gravitationally bound collection of stars, swirling in a spiral through space. To get a better sense, for instance, of the true distances to exoplanets – planets around other stars – we might start with the theater in which we find them, the Milky Way galaxy When we talk about the enormity of the cosmos, it’s easy to toss out big numbers – but far more difficult to wrap our minds around just how large, how far, and how numerous celestial bodies really are. Keep going to Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighboring star, and plan on arriving in 4.25 years at light speed. A trip at light-speed to the very edge of our solar system – the farthest reaches of the Oort Cloud, a collection of dormant comets way, way out there – would take about 1.87 years. In an hour, light can travel 671 million miles.Įarth is about eight light minutes from the Sun. Light is fast, but the distances are vast.
It takes 43.2 minutes for sunlight to reach Jupiter, about 484 million miles away. How far can light travel in one minute? 11,160,000 miles. Also: LIGHT IS FAST, nothing travels faster than light. It’s the distance that light travels in a specific period of time. We use light-time to measure the vast distances of space. Make the jump to light-years as we cruise through the Milky Way galaxy.
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