Five robotic spacecraft have sufficient velocity to escape the bounds of our solar system and travel into interstellar space, but only one—NASA's Voyager 1—has crossed that boundary so far.
Although gas is pervasive between galaxies, it isn't the only thing out there; astronomers have also found stars. Sometimes called intergalactic or rogue stars, these stars are thought to have been flung from their birth galaxies by black holes or collisions with other galaxies.
The Milky Way (our galaxy) is approximately 100,000 light years across, so it has a radius of 50,000 light years. The Sun is not at the center of the galaxy, but is about 26,000 light years from the center. Now for your question: No, No man-made spacecraft has even left our solar system.
It's Space Day, but traveling the vast entity that is space would take far longer than a single day. The nearest galaxy: 749,000,000 (that's 749 million) years. The end of the known universe: 225,000,000,000,000 years (that's 225 trillion) years.
No spacecraft has gone farther than NASA's Voyager 1. Launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012 and continues to collect data.
Voyager 1 will leave the solar system aiming toward the constellation Ophiuchus. In the year 40,272 AD (more than 38,200 years from now), Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of an obscure star in the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Bear or Little Dipper) called AC+79 3888.
Light-year is the distance light travels in one year. Light zips through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second and 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers) per year.
The light that travels the longest gets stretched by the greatest amount, and the object that emitted that light is now at a greater distance because the universe is expanding. We can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away precisely because of the expanding universe.
There's a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn't existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding).
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16.
Two billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda, our closest neighboring galaxy, will begin to fuse into one giant football-shaped galaxy.
But there's a very rare type that's striking and beautiful: ring galaxies. They make up only 1-in-10,000 of all the galaxies out there, with the first one, Hoag's object, only discovered in 1950. After more than 70 years, we've finally figured out how the Universe makes them.
The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction. However, theoretically speaking, there is nothing to conclusively indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible.
No, they don't believe there's an end to space. However, we can only see a certain volume of all that's out there. Since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, light from a galaxy more than 13.8 billion light-years away hasn't had time to reach us yet, so we have no way of knowing such a galaxy exists.
Some galaxies will have fallen over the cosmic horizon, where no amount of time would ever let you reach them. If you wanted to travel 100 trillion light years away, you could make the journey in 62 years.
Astronomers have discovered what may be the oldest and most distant galaxy ever observed. The galaxy, called HD1, dates from a bit more than 300 million years after the Big Bang that marked the origin of the universe some 13.8 billion years ago, researchers said on Thursday.
The galaxy candidate HD1 is the farthest object in the universe (Image credit: Harikane et al.) A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen.
Since there is virtually nothing in space to scatter or re-radiate the light to our eye, we see no part of the light and the sky appears to be black.
SInce light-year is the distance travelled by the light in one year while travelling with the speed of light i.e. 3×108m/s 3 × 10 8 m / s . It would take 500 years to travel 500 light-year distance at the speed of light.
Re: How would you age at the speed of light
The simple answer is, anything moving through space at c, equal to the speed of light in a vacuum, experiences zero time flow. If you were to travel at the speed of light, you would experience no time.
Nope. They have small amounts of hydrazine fuel left and have no possible way to slow down and head back. They are traveling very fast (Voyager 1 is at 38,088 mph or 17.027 km/s relative to the sun) and have very little ability to change speed now.
Both Voyagers will likely outlive Earth, he added: when, billions of years from now, the sun swells into a red giant, the Voyagers, albeit without power, will continue on course for the unknown. Swisdak says: "Nothing comes close to Voyager in terms of interplanetary missions. They wanted to look at Jupiter and Saturn.
No. The Voyagers are so far away that there's nothing to take a picture of. Nearly 30 years ago, Voyager 1 took one last set of photos before shutting off the camera. That's where the famous “pale blue dot” photo comes from.