Thursday, February 5, 2009

Science Fact of the Every Other Day...

Question: on earth we measure distance in meters or yards and feet, miles etc, how do we measure distance in intergalactic space?

Answer: in Parsecs

One parsec equals 3.26 light years. On earth that would be about 19 trillion miles or 103,000 round trips to the Sun from the Earth. Our solar system, by way of further example, is only 1/800ths of one light year across.

The nearest known star to the Earth (other than the Sun) is Proxima Centauri, 1.29 parsecs away.

The center of the Milky Way is about 8000 parsecs from the Earth.

One gigaparsec (Gpc) is one billion parsecs. It is believed that the entire Universe has a diameter of about 28 Gpc.

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