Just saw a story about a new galaxy, now get this, I have to put it on another line to get all the numbers in:
78,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away!! Holy cow "Batman", how do you pronounce that?
If we had a space ship of some kind, which would travel at 1,000,000 miles per hour, how long would it take for us to get there?
I would think 2 generations of humans, but I am not that good at math!
Wow, who in world would want to spend their whole life on a space ship? After seeing how many signed up for the "Virgin" space folly, I would guess there would be a lot of takers.
OK a few issues here:
at the snail speed of 1 million miles per hour, it would take you about half a billion years just to get out of our own galaxy... That is more than the entire history of planet earth since the first dinosaurs - a bit more than 2 human generations... that speed is not even enough to overcome the expansion of the universe, so you may never reach your destination (we see it moving away from us very very close to the speed of light).
If you increase the speed to very very close to the speed of light, the passage of time for the people inside will slow down relative to you, so the travel for them will seem shorter. This is somewhat similar to putting them to sleep for the journey.
That galaxy is both "new" and very very old. The light took about 13 billion years to get to us, so you are observing a galaxy which is now 13 billion years old, but you see it as a very young galaxy. In fact, it is older than our own galaxy.
It's 13,268,408,011 light years... so it takes light 13 billion (with a B) years to get here from there...
If the universe stood still... since it is expanding, it would take light an even longer time to travel back.
