So I wanted to start What I Like About Space with a bang, so here is a list of my top five favourite things about space!
5. Space is Big.
Space is mind-bogglingly big. Space is so big you could travel your entire life in a spaceship going as fast as we know how to make it go and not even reach the closest star. And there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. Wow.
Space is so enormously huge that astronomers had to come up with a new measurement of distance to describe just how far away things are. They took the fastest stuff in the universe, light, (which travels at roughly 300,000,000m in a second!) and calculated how far it traveled in a year. That’s 9,460,528,405,000km (5,878,499,814,210.01miles). Our nearest neighbour, Alpha Centauri, is 4 light-years away. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how far that is. Our galaxy is an even more mind-numbing one hundred thousand light-years from side to side. The biggest galaxy close to us, Andromeda, is over two million light years from the Milky Way. And the edge of the visible universe is approximately 13.5 billion light-years away.
*pant* *pant*
Wow. The universe is huge. We’re absolutely miniscule. And I love it.
