NorthernLights Posted May 10, 2016 Share Posted May 10, 2016 Remember how exciting it used to be when they discovered a new exoplanet? Well, tomorrow they'll announce over 1200 new ones - http://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-announces-its-biggest-ever-haul-planets-beyond-solar-system 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fide Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 This image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which was over 100ft long, gives me the fear. The size of the actual Universe makes me want to spew At best guess, the Universe is 96 billion light years across. Meaning that, travelling at 186,000 miles PER SECOND, it would take you 96 billion light years to traverse it. And at that speed it would take you 100,000 years to cross our Milky Way galaxy. Im even worse when people start explaining that when you see a twinkling star, you're actually looking into the past and that particular star could've died before you were even born Betelgeuse is 642.5 light years away. Meaning that when you look up at the Orion constellation and see it's orange glow, you're seeing light from around 1374, when Edward III was monarch. Betelgeuse could have went supernova in 1375 and we wouldn't know about it until next year. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fullerene Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 Betelgeuse could have went supernova in 1375 and we wouldn't know about it until next year. If it had gone supernova, Zaphod Beeblebrox would have told us! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tamdunk Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 At best guess, the Universe is 96 billion light years across. Meaning that, travelling at 186,000 miles PER SECOND, it would take you 96 billion light years to traverse it. And at that speed it would take you 100,000 years to cross our Milky Way galaxy. Betelgeuse is 642.5 light years away. Meaning that when you look up at the Orion constellation and see it's orange glow, you're seeing light from around 1374, when Edward III was monarch. Betelgeuse could have went supernova in 1375 and we wouldn't know about it until next year. How do people factor in the expansion of the universe when calculating this? Surely if it's expanding then by the time you're halfway it'll have increased in size multiple times. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dee Man Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 How do people factor in the expansion of the universe when calculating this? Surely if it's expanding then by the time you're halfway it'll have increased in size multiple times. Plus some astromers recently said that there may never have been a big bang and there may be no beginning and end. Try thinking about that after a heavy smoke. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glenconner Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 Plus some astromers recently said that there may never have been a big bang and there may be no beginning and end. Try thinking about that after a heavy smoke. Sounds a bit religious. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fullerene Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 At best guess, the Universe is 96 billion light years across. Meaning that, travelling at 186,000 miles PER SECOND, it would take you 96 billion light years to traverse it. And at that speed it would take you 100,000 years to cross our Milky Way galaxy. Betelgeuse is 642.5 light years away. Meaning that when you look up at the Orion constellation and see it's orange glow, you're seeing light from around 1374, when Edward III was monarch. Betelgeuse could have went supernova in 1375 and we wouldn't know about it until next year. Not sure if I have my figures right but it something like this: Travel around the world = 40,075 km Travel 10 times that distance will get you to the moon. Travel 400 times that distance will get you to the sun Travel 300 times that distance will get you to Neptune Travel 100 times that distance will get you to Alpha Centauri Travel 160 times that distance will get you to Betelguese Travel 150 times that distance will get you to the centre of the Milky Way Travel 250 times that distance will get you to the Andromeda Galaxy Travel 40,000 times that distance will get you to the edge of the universe 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Silvio Tattiescone Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 Hmm. My Passat gets about 50mpg - how many gallons will I need to get me to the edge of the universe? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
welshbairn Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 Hmm. My Passat gets about 50mpg - how many gallons will I need to get me to the edge of the universe? Depends how much of a hurry you're in. You wouldn't need any if you just let a rocket whip you into space at a speed that would release you from the Earth and Sun's gravity. By the time you got there it probably wouldn't exist anymore which would be a bit of a bummer. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BFTD Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 (edited) Hmm. My Passat gets about 50mpg - how many gallons will I need to get me to the edge of the universe? Just enough to get you free of the Earth's atmosphere. You aren't bothered about how long it'll take, are you? Or whether you can breathe, etc. Edit: or, what he said ^^^ Edited May 29, 2016 by BigFatTabbyDave 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Silvio Tattiescone Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 Nobody who drives a Passat worries about how long journeys take. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zen Archer (Raconteur) Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 Nobody who drives a Passat worries about how long journeys take. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
welshbairn Posted May 29, 2016 Share Posted May 29, 2016 Nobody who drives a Passat worries about how long journeys take. Apparently it can't be done even in souped up Ford Escort. Stephan Hoyer, Physics Ph.D, UC Berkeley 13.1k Views • Upvoted by Abhijeet Borkar and David Simmons-Duffin, Physicist There are two issues here. First, the universe is expanding, at a rate given by the Hubble's law. For the visible universe as a whole, the current rate of expansion is faster than the speed of light. The universe has only been around for 13.7 billion years, but the visible universe has a radius of 46 billion light-years. On average, the "other end" of the universe has been receding 4 light-years further away every year. Clearly then there is no hope of actually traversing the visible universe. So instead, let's suppose we're interested in how long it would take to traverse the current diameter of the visible universe. That's 92 billion light-years, so to an observer on Earth it would take 92 billion years. In the spacecraft, the time interval t′t′ is given by t′=t/γt′=t/γ where tt in the time elapsed elapsed on Earth and γγ is the Lorentz factor, γ=11−v2/c2√γ=11−v2/c2 . In the case of a object moving at 0.99999c, this works out to about 410 million years experienced in the space-ship, which is still a rather long time! Written Jan 13, 2011 • View Upvotes https://www.quora.com/If-you-could-travel-at-99999-the-speed-of-light-how-long-would-it-take-you-to-traverse-the-visible-universe-in-objective-time-as-an-observer-on-earth-and-also-in-subjective-time-as-a-passenger-on-the-spacecraft 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fullerene Posted June 10, 2016 Share Posted June 10, 2016 (edited) ..and no replies about the universe. First page all mine. Do I win a prize! (In other words, why is nobody entering any reply to anything on this forum - apart from Firhill Road and Granny Danger) Edited June 11, 2016 by Fullerene 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AMMjag Posted June 11, 2016 Share Posted June 11, 2016 ^^^ out of the loop 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
welshbairn Posted June 11, 2016 Share Posted June 11, 2016 Shame that. I worked out a full proof way of harnessing the power of dark energy to fuel faster than light travel and posted it in the wasteland. Totally forgotten what it was now. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
banana Posted June 11, 2016 Share Posted June 11, 2016 Shame that. I worked out a full proof way of harnessing the power of dark energy to fuel faster than light travel and posted it in the wasteland. Totally forgotten what it was now. What happened in The Wasteland stays in The Wasteland. Also, it's 'foolproof'. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
welshbairn Posted June 11, 2016 Share Posted June 11, 2016 What happened in The Wasteland stays in The Wasteland. Also, it's 'foolproof'. The only thing I remember was it involved the medium of 100% alcohol. At least alcohol was definitely involved somewhere. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dorlomin Posted June 11, 2016 Share Posted June 11, 2016 Hmm. My Passat gets about 50mpg - how many gallons will I need to get me to the edge of the universe? There is no edge of the universe. There is a sphere in space we call the "Surface of Last Scattering" which is the point the universe cooled enough to allow light to exist, this happened at the same instant across the universe, about 380 000 years after the big bang. This is the edge of the visible universe and is the point where it has taken the age of the universe since then for the light emitted in that moment to reach us. As the Universe has expanded that is no longer an incredibly hot mass and has "cooled" to the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. So the answer is that for an alien looking at us from a point on the Surface of Last Scattering, we are the edge of their visible universe, thus the answer is 0 gallons. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DA Baracus Posted June 11, 2016 Share Posted June 11, 2016 The Universe constantly expands to it's limit the utterly contracts in on itself until every single thing and every single place in every single point of time is a single atom. Then it explodes outward again (The Big Bang) and the process repeats again for infinity. For all we know this could have happened 2357733 billion times or 3 times. We'll never know and it's irrelevant as is time to the universe 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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