Lightspeed Time-Distance Reference

Sorry, your browser doesn't support Java.

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

Click this text to go to a great website - The Atlas of the Universe.
It will give you a perspective on where you are in the Cosmos.

- your current speed is 186,282 miles/sec -

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, 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 sister 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?