> Physics & Astronomy News

	Philae Probe Lands on the Rosetta Comet ESA’s Rosetta mission has soft-landed its Philae probe on a comet, the first time in history that such an extraordinary feat has been achieved.
	New Technique for Generating Electricity Demonstrated Scientists have demonstrated a new technique for generating electrical energy. The new method can be used in harvesting energy from mechanical vibrations of the environment and converting it into electricity.

	Astronomers Solve Puzzle About Bizarre Object at the Center of our Galaxy Latest research suggests enormous black hole drove two binary stars to merge into one.
	Existence of Interacting Parallel Worlds Proposed Many Interacting Worlds theory challenges foundations of quantum science
	Universe May Face a darker future New research offers a novel insight into the nature of dark matter and dark energy and what the future of our Universe might be.

more physics & astronomy news stories

From Here To There

by Gene Mascoli and ScienceIQ.com

Image of the spiral galaxy NGC 4414

Image Courtesy NSSDC Photo Gallery

We all know that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is big -- very big. So big in fact that its size is impossible to grasp. To cope with the astronomical distances of galaxies, since miles or kilometers won't do, scientists have had to resort to using a really big yardstick. That yardstick is the distance light travels in one year, what scientists call a 'light year.' A light year is an obvious choice. It makes use of a concept that we are all familiar with, a year, the time it takes Earth to travel around our Sun. It also makes use of something that eats up a lot of miles, the distance light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, covers in one year, 5 trillion, 880 billion miles or, approximately 6 million million miles.

Now for some of you, the concept of a light year is familiar. But that's the point. It sounds familiar and tame to say that Alpha-Centauri, our nearest star, is 4.3 light years away. But if we add the zeros, we truly see how isolated we are, circling our Sun in our corner of the Milky Way. Alpha-Centauri is 25,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth.

Now consider that the most distant objects that we can see without a telescope are about 1.75 million light years away. There we go again -- big numbers. But that's a big number of something that already is a gigantic number. And that doesn't even take into consideration what the Hubble Space Telescope can see, distances of over 7 billion light years away. We are just now seeing light that left those distance realms in the early days of the universe. The universe is indeed a very, very big place.

Search

Science Quote

'If one wishes to obtain a definite answer from Nature one must attack the question from a more general and less selfish point of view.'

Max Planck
(1858-1947)