How long would it take to travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other?

The disk of our home galaxy – the Milky Way – is bigger than we previously thought. A new study shows it would take 200,000 years for a spaceship traveling at the speed of light to go across the entire galaxy.

How big is the Milky Way galaxy when measured from one end to the other?

100,000 light-years
Our galaxy probably contains 100 to 400 billion stars, and is about 100,000 light-years across. That sounds huge, and it is, at least until we start comparing it to other galaxies.

Does the center of the Milky Way move?

Answer: Yes, the Sun – in fact, our whole solar system – orbits around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. We are moving at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr. But even at that high rate, it still takes us about 230 million years to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way!

What would happen if we were closer to the center of the Milky Way?

The closer you get to the heart of the galaxy, the tighter stars are packed together. Because of this high star density, the Earth would be blasted with a lot more radiation than what the Sun throws at you right now. Under these circumstances, the odds of life ever evolving would be pretty small.

Is the Milky Way bigger than the Galaxy?

The Milky Way is big, but some galaxies, like our Andromeda Galaxy neighbor, are much larger. The universe is all of the galaxies – billions of them!

What is the size of the Milky Way?

52,850 light years
Milky Way/Radius

What would happen if the solar system left the Milky Way?

In the short term, no, nothing bad will happen. The Milky Way is not particularly important to us in terms of keeping the solar system together, protecting us from anything dangerous, and so on.

How long would it take a star to cross the Milky Way?

It Would Take 200,000 Years at Light Speed to Cross the Milky Way. (One light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles or 10 trillion kilometers.) To put the find in perspective with the location of our own sun, astronomers said the newly found disk stars are about three times farther from the galaxy center than the sun.

What is the distance from the center of the Milky Way?

It lies about 8 kpc from the center on what is known as the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. Parallaxes give us distances to stars up to perhaps a few thousand light years.

How long would it take Voyager to travel across the Milky Way?

At 17.3 km/s, it would take Voyager over1,700,000,000 years to traverse the entire length of the Milky Way. Even traveling at the speed of light, it would take nearly a hundred thousand years!

How long would it take a spaceship to travel across the Galaxy?

The disk of our home galaxy – the Milky Way – is bigger than we previously thought. A new study shows it would take 200,000 years for a spaceship traveling at the speed of light to go across the entire galaxy. Researchers made the find after analyzing the abundances of metals (heavy elements) in stars, also known as their metallicities.