Here's a picture everybody should see to realise how huge our Milky Way is. The picture itself contains more than one billion stars and 150 billion pixels.
It combines
data from two near-infrared telescopes – the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT)
in Hawaii and the VISTA telescope in Chile - and is the result of a
decade-long collaboration by astronomers at the University of Edinburgh and the
University of Cambridge to process, archive and publish the prodigious
quantities of sky survey data generated by these two telescopes.
Another
number to keep in mind: the Milky Way spans across 120,000 light-years, meaning that if
you could travel at the speed of light (pretty fast) during 100 years (pretty
boring), you would cover 0.083% of its diameter. Traveling at the speed of the
fastest man-made object (Helios 2 probe, 252,792 km/h), you would need more than 512
million years to cross our Milky Way.
[source]
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