• Question: if you traveled 10Billion miles away from our Milky way, what would you expect to find?

    Asked by Txrtles to Rebecca, Iain, Hayley, Anna on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Iain Bethune

      Iain Bethune answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Probably not very much! Maybe a few scattered hydrogen atoms and dust particles. The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way (that is clearly separated) is the Large Magellanic Cloud. This is already 0.163 million light-years away. 1 million light years is about 5 billion,billion miles. So the LMC is 0.163*5 = about 1 billion,billion miles away. In fact, 10billion miles from Earth wouldn’t even take you out of the Milky Way.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Interesting question and a very interesting answer from Iain 🙂

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