How long does it take light from the center of the milky way 8kpc away to reach the solar system?

Answer 1

A good long way - about 25,000 light years or so, and thank goodness for that! There is, we believe, a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky way (and probably at the centers of most large galaxies) and it would be very unhealthy to be anywhere near it.

Answer 2

It's about Three/fifths the distance from the center to the edge. The distance from the center to the edge is about 50,000 light years so the sun is about 30,000 light years from the center of The Milky Way. Of course this is very oproximate seeing that we don't really know the diameter of the MIlky way

Answer 3

The closest Galaxy to us (apart form the Milkyway in which we sit), is the The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy (an irregular galaxy) located about 25,000 light-years away from our Solar System. Then there are the two satellite galaxies to ours, the large and small Magellanic Clouds. The LMC lies about 160,000 light years away and while the SMC is around 200,000 light years away.

After these comes the Andromeda Galaxy, which is a separate spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth.

Note, there may be some closer remnants of galaxies that the Milky Way has consumed that could be argued to be closer.

Answer 4

If you find a place where the sky is good and dark and you know where to look, you can see the
Andromeda Galaxy in the night sky. It looks like a fuzzy patch of dim, hazy light. It's actually a
galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, completely outside of the Milky Way galaxy that we live in.

The distance to the Andromeda Galaxy is usually given as a couple of million light years.
That would be the answer to the above question.

Answer 5

We are part of the Milky Way, so you could use the distance it is from us as a measurement. The Pinwheel Galaxy is about 27 million light years from us. That is about 15,837,379,200,000,000,000 miles away.

Answer 6

Earth and our Solar System are in the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is shaped like a frisbee with spiral arms emanating from the central region. Earth is about two thirds of the way out from the center. Our galaxy is between 100,000 and 120,000 light years in diameter, so we are roughly 70,000 light years away from the center. A light year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one earth year.

Answer 7

We don't know exactly... it's hard to measure, since we're in the milky way and can't really see all of it, so we have to do a certain amount of guessing based on what we can see.

Current thinking is that it's somewhere around 8 kiloparsecs, or about 25,000-28,000 light years.

Answer 8

We don't know at the moment whether the center of the Milky Way is

actually 8 kiloparsecs away, but going strictly by the number given in

the question:

1 parsec = 3.262 light years

1 kpc = 3,262 light years

8 kpc = 26,096 light years.

So light that originates 8 kiloparsecs from the solar system arrives here

26,096 years later.

Answer 9

The current ballpark estimate is 2.5 million light years (to the Andromeda galaxy).

That would be 2.37 x 1022 meters.

We're pretty sure that you posted this question in order to see a really big number,

so here it is:

23,652,126,430,000,000,000,000 meters. (rounded to the nearest ten trillion meters)

Answer 10

The Milky Way Galaxy center is on the move and so is the spiral arms and like wise the sun rotates around the galaxy so the figure of 1,400 light years away may have a minor fluctuation but in part is the recognised distance from the sun to the Galactic center of the Milky way