What would it look like to travel across the Milky Way in four minutes? Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years across – traveling that distance in four minutes comes with interesting physics-related consequences. Come along for the ride as we fall into the Milky Way galaxy and back out again – take a look:
Kudos to Stargaze for this and other astronomical videos. Some fun facts about this segment:
- Traveling 100,000 light-years in 4 minutes means we traveled 1,500,000 light years per hour!
- In a year, we would have traveled 13,140,000,000 light years, or 7.7 sextillion miles!
- At that speed, it takes 3.53 years to travel from one end of the universe to the other – no bathroom breaks.
So yeah, that’s what it looks like to scream across the Milky Way in four minutes. Or does it? Light, moving at light speed, looks different if you go faster than light. Per science.howstuffworks:
“You would also experience some strange visual consequences. One such consequence is called aberration, and it refers to how your entire field of view would shrink down to a tiny, tunnel-shaped “window” out in front of your spacecraft. This happens because photons (those exceedingly tiny packets of light) — even photons behind you — appear to come in from the forward direction.
“In addition, you would notice an extreme Doppler effect, which would cause light waves from stars in front of you to crowd together, making the objects appear blue. Light waves from stars behind you would spread apart and appear red … When these stars move out of your perceptible wavelength, they simply appear to fade to black or vanish against the background.”
I hope you enjoyed this dive through this scifi wonderland. Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!
