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.

Is the Milky Way 100000 light years across?

Our galaxy probably contains 100 to 400 billion stars, and is about 100,000 light-years across.

How many light years does it take to get out of the Milky Way?

So, to leave our Galaxy, we would have to travel about 500 light-years vertically, or about 25,000 light-years away from the galactic centre. We’d need to go much further to escape the ‘halo’ of diffuse gas, old stars and globular clusters that surrounds the Milky Way’s stellar disk.

Is the Milky Way a large galaxy?

Size and mass The Milky Way is the second-largest galaxy in the Local Group (after the Andromeda Galaxy), with its stellar disk approximately 170,000–200,000 light-years (52–61 kpc) in diameter and, on average, approximately 1,000 ly (0.3 kpc) thick.

How many light-years across is the Milky Way?

Past studies have suggested the Milky Way is between 100,000 light-years and 160,000 light-years across. (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,…

What is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way?

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the closest spiral galaxy to us, and though it’s gravitationally bound to the Milky Way, it’s not the closest galaxy by far – being 2 million light years away.

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.

How big is the stellar disk of the Milky Way?

Its stellar disk is approximately 100.000 light-years / 30 kpc in diameter. It is approximately 1.000 light-years / 0.3 kpc thick. The Local Group is about 10 million light-years across, and the Andromeda galaxy is the most massive galaxy in it, The Milky Way is the second-most massive.