Cosmic Voyage

Our Cosmic Voyage!

Travelling at the speed of light on our cosmic voyage ,it has only been 1.3 seconds and we have already landed on the moon. The moon is a crater scared satellite, the word "moon" came from the latin name "luna". The word "lunatic" comes from "Luna" because it was believed that the moon rays caused insanity.

Next step Mars, light minutes after the moon we reach the planet Mars. Named after the God of War, Mars is a reddish planet that symbolized blood to the Greeks and Romans.

After passing the giant...giants of our Solar System Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune we reach the small cold planet Pluto. Pluto is so far away it took us four light hours to get there. The name Pluto came from the God of the Underworld.

Now past the last planet in our Solar System we reach the comets. Now we are two light months away from earth. Astronomers estimate that there are a trillion comets floating just around are Solar System. The orbits of the comets are enormous! Just one orbit takes about one million years ! There's a spherical cloud of comets named the Oort cloud and it's about 7.5 to 15 trillion kilometers across!

After the comets we travel 4.2 light years to the closest star Proxima Centauri. In our fastest rocket ships it would take almost 70 000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

24000 light years from earth, we reach the edge of the milky way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is 100 000 light years across and the "nuclear buldge" in the center of the galaxy, is 10 000 light years from top to bottom. There are approximatly 200 billion stars in our galaxy,including some stars outside the wheel shaped galaxy called Halo Stars.

If you think about it, a billion stars is a lot of stars. A billion seconds is thirty-one years. A billion drops of water would overflow an Olympic sized pool.

The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda Galaxy. WOW! we're a long way out from Earth even though we've only travelled to one of the trillions of trillions of galaxies out there. Anyway, this galaxy is 2,500,000 light years away from Earth.

Well, this is where our cosmic voyage will end. 300,000,000 light years away from our home planet Earth. We could easily go further but everything would just be the same. All of the galaxies are clumped together to form chains. All of the chains are moving away from each other so fast that every two seconds the Centuars Galaxy Cluster is increasing it's distance from us by the width of North America.

Everything in the universe is so far away that you see it as it was. So since the sun is 8.3 light seconds away from us, we see it as it was 8.3 seconds before. The farthest thing you can see unaided is the Andromedia Galaxy. The Andromedia Galaxy is so far away that you see it as it was 3 million years ago.

Nothing in the world travels faster then light. It is the fastest possible speed for anything in our universe to travel despite of what you may see or read in science fiction movies or books. It would take extraterrestrial spacecrafts that travel as fast as light for U.F.O's to abduct the human race."