MadSci Network: Astronomy |
Tom, The answer to your question: no man-made object has travelled outside our galaxy (the Milky Way). The farthest man made object is the Voyager 1 spacecraft which left earth on September 5, 1977. In over 26 years of travel, it has made it about 8.4 billion miles from earth. As far as that sounds, that only carries it just beyond our solar system. To find out a lot more about Voyager 1, you should visit the voyager web site: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ The Milky Way galaxy is a MUCH bigger than our solar system. In fact the Milky Way is made of over 200 billion stars! And our sun is just one of them! And just to give you an idea of how big the Milky Way is. If you could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). It would take you over 100,000 years to travel from one side to the other! For comparison, the voyager spacecraft is traveling about 10.5 miles per second. So it would take voyager over 1.7 billion years to make it that far! So as you can see, getting out of the galaxy is something that just isn't possible with current technology. Just getting to the edge of the solar system took over 26 years! For more information of the Milky Way galaxy, visit: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/solarsystem/where.shtml -Steve
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