Moon

We often don't realize how far away things are in space. Take the Moon for example. If we were to drive to the moon in our car, which certainly isn't possible, we would have to travel 363,258 km at its closest point or 405,542 km at its farthest point. A kilometer is roughly 3/5 ths of a mile, so you would have to drive about 217, 955 miles to reach it, when it is closest. This distance is nothing when you consider ths size of the universe, but if you consider that you really have to push to drive to Florida from New York in one day and that is only about about 1,000 miles, which means, if you really set your mind to it and just drove with time for sleeping and food, it would take you 218 days to drive to Luna. Can you imagine the kids in the back seat screaming, "are we there yet", the entire time? There is a strange thing about our moon, it is very large compared to most of the moons in the solar system. There are only four bigger ones. We have almost a double planet system. The Moon is getting further away every year, since the gravitational tides from Earth are forcing the Moon's orbit away from us at the rate of 3.8 centimeters per year. Hardly anything to worry about now. Over millions of years this could make a difference in the tidal pull of the Moon. The Moon is a relative lightweight compared to Earth. It is 1/4 the size of the Earth, but only 1/50 th the volume.

Venus

For some mistaken idea, some people think that Mars is the closest planet to Earth, this isn't true, it is the planet Venus. The thing is, Mars seems to be far more interesting for several reasons:
1. We can see the surface
2. NASA has robots on it exploring the surface
3. Water may have been found there
4, Some believe that there are ruins on the planet that indicate former life.
But let's get back to Venus. Venus has been called the sister world to Earth, but in reality, aside from size, it is an entirely alien planet. What if we were to get back into our car and drive there? How long would the drive take? Before I go any further, you have to remember that you can't travel in a straight line to these planets, because they are in motion around the Sun, but for this exercise we will forget about that, even though it adds tons of miles to the trip. The closest that Venus ever comes to the Earth is 25,000,000 miles. Let's plan our trip using this distance because we need to take every advantage. Are you ready for this? It would take 25,000 days to drive there if we really kept the pedal to the metal and this is the closest planet. If your wife gave birth in the back seat at the start of the trip, you child would be 68+ years old by the time you got there. You better drive faster. You would find a world with a crushing, un breathable atmosphere where temperatures average 855 degrees F. You better take an air conditioner.

Oh you want to travel a little further? What do you say that we drive to Neptune. At times Neptune is the farthest planet from the sun, even further than Pluto, which most don't consider a planet anymore. Neptune is a gas giant and the farthest one we know of from the Sun in our solar system. Almost 60 Earth sized planets could fit inside of it. It is so far away from the Sun that it takes 165 years just to orbit it once. This is going to be a long trip. Got all the supplies ready, we will surely need a lot of them for this trip, because the distance from Neptune is 3,000,000,000 miles from the Sun when you calculate its average distance. We are about 93,000,000 miles. This means that Neptune has an average distance from Earth of 2,907,000,000 miles. We might need a second driver. Oh well, let's get into our car and give it a shot. I calculate the trip to take 2,907,000 days. This is almost 8,000 years. Unfortunately if we would have started our trip in 6,0000 B.C., we would be just about arriving there. I think we need a faster car. Who wants to go there anyway, there are storms on that planet that travel at 700 mph. Scientists are guessing that there is super hot water on the planet that never boils away. The atmospheric pressure is so strong that the water is retained. I don't think I would like it here.

I think it is time to take a trip to the closest star and see what is happening there. Wait, this is a trick question since the Sun is the closest star to Earth. Let's go to the next closest star, Proxima Centauri which is 4.21 light years away. By the way most people say it is Alpha Centauri or Rigil Kentaurus Alpha, but both of these stars are 4.3 light years away. The mix up here is that Proxima Centauri is part of the Alpha Centauri star system. So what are we really saying when we talk about light years, what kinds of distances are these? Well to put is simply, if we calculate light as traveling about 186,000 miles in a second, a light year would mean that an object would be about 5,865,696,000,000 miles away. This is not entirely accurate since I rounded out the figures on the light year, but it is close enough for this type of exercise. Proxima Centauri is roughly 2,469,458,016,000 miles away. I think that from this point on, it is impractical to use miles, so we use light years. Just remember that a light year is about 5,865,696,000,000 miles and would take you 58,656,900 days to drive or 160,786 years for a one way drive.

Andromeda Galaxy

The Andromeda Galaxy is a galaxy much like our own. It is a spiral galaxy. We are located on one of the arms of a spiral in our own galaxy. This might be an interesting place to see. We can no longer drive our car, it just doesn't cut it. As a matter of fact, there is no known propulsion system that would get us to this galaxy before we were LONG dead. The Andromeda Galaxy or nebula, as it is sometimes referred to, is 2.5 million light years away from us. It was long believed that this galaxy was the largest of the local group of galaxies, but the thinking here is changing. Scientists have been conducting tests and now believe that there is more dark matter in the Milky Way Galaxy, our own, and therefore ours is the biggest galaxy. If you have a dark sky overhead, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy with the, pardon the expression, naked eye.

Well this is all well and good, but we really don't know the size of the universe yet or even if it has a size limit. Scientists claim that the universe is about 14 billion years old. This is based on the oldest ancient white dwarf stars found. In 2004 the most distant object in the universe was found. It is said to be so far from us, that light reaching us now is from when the universe was 750,000,000 years old. The object was not located in Abell 2218, but this was used as a gravitational lens to see it. A gravitational lens is a massive foreground object that can magnify light. Distance measurements are conducted using the shift of light to the red. The more redder an object's light is, the more distant it is, or so science has said. This object had a redshift of almost 7.0. Nothing has ever had such a shift. I can't help but wonder if all redshifts are caused by distance?. I know that is what is said by science. Some scientists suspect that the distances of quasi-stellar objects are not being measured accurately, by using the redshift method. It just might turn out that measuring by redshift is fine for some objects, but is inaccurate for others. By the way, the most distant objects is a group of stars and is thought to be about 13 billion light years distant.