m51.com Lightspeed Time-Distance Reference

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Purpose of the Lightspeed Sector:
To encourage parents/kidlings/students to think about:

the properties of light
the times and distances involved
how wondrous the Cosmos truly is
relaying this wonderment to your offspring/students
the brevity of a human lifespan, or all of recorded history for that matter,
as compared to the timescale in GEOLOGY and ASTRONOMY

We'll miss ya, Jack...we're looking up

Enjoy the Journey.....begin at 14 billion....then zoom in:
An Atlas of the Universe

Your current speed is 186,282 miles/sec.
That's about 670,000,000 miles per hour.

It takes you 1 second to circumnavigate the Earth 7 times.

You are 8 light minutes from the Sun.

You are 3.9 light years from the nearest star (other than our sun) - Alpha Proxima.

A Light Year is roughly 6 trillion miles.

You are about 30,000 Light Years from the center of your galaxy.
You live in an average size galaxy...roughly 100,000-120,000 Light Years in diameter.

Your neighbor spiral galaxy, m31 (Andromeda), is about 2.3 million lt. yrs. distant.

Here is a bit of history on lightspeed research.

Albert Abraham Michelson

Carl Sagan - Time Travel / LightSpeed

Approximate Time - Distance Reference:

Our Sun - 8.3 Minutes
Pluto - 5.3 Hours
Proxima Centauri (Closest Star, other than our Sun) - 3.9 Years
Andromeda (M31 - Our Sister Spiral Galaxy) - between 2.3 and 2.9 million Years
An interesting note: "The modern values for Galactic rotation and heliocentric radial velocity
yield that the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are approaching each other at about 100 km/sec."
- Quote from the S.E.D.S. website
Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) - 37 million Years
Sombrero Galaxy (M104) in the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies - a beautiful object. It takes Light about 65 million years to reach Earth from this cluster.
What important event took place on Earth about 65 million years ago?