Stars' escape velocity shows how to exit the Milky Way (2024)
Getting out of the galaxy might take an antimatter engine. Future explorers departing the Milky Way will have to boost their spaceship to 0.2 per cent of the speed of light, according to a study of fast-moving stars in our galaxy.
Tilmann Piffl at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany, and his colleagues used the latest data from the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) survey. The survey uses the Anglo-Australian Observatory‘s 1.2-metre Schmidt telescope in Siding Spring, New South Wales, Australia, to measure the distances to stars and the speeds at which they are moving away or towards us, among other properties. The latest survey studied about 426,000 stars.
From this survey and a previously published star catalogue, the team selected 90 high-velocity stars whose speeds and positions had been determined most precisely. Some of them are moving at speeds of more than 300 kilometres per second, about one-thousandth of the speed of light.
The team then studied various models of Milky Way-sized spiral galaxies to determine which one best fit the observed stars and their velocities. The most suitable simulated galaxies had masses of about 1.6 trillion suns.
With the likely mass of the galaxy in hand, the team calculated the escape velocity for objects in the vicinity of our solar system. To escape the gravitational clutches of our galaxy, a spaceship would need to zoom out of our solar system and hit 537 kilometres per second. For context, a rocket needs to roar off at just 11.2 kilometres per second to escape Earth’s gravity.
Conventional rocket engines would never make it. The chemical rockets that power most spacecraft today would require too much fuel, and even high-tech ion engines – which are efficient enough for long journeys around the solar system – max out at about 15 kilometres per second.
But Bland-Hawthorn speculates that a propulsion system powered by the energy released by combining matter with antimatter could do the trick. The challenge, of course, would be find ways to create and confine large amounts of antimatter. “I know it’s a crazy idea, but if you had lots of matter and lots of antimatter, you could power a spaceship out of the galaxy,” he says.
For a human-made object to leave the Milky Way, significant advancements in space travel technology are required. Concepts like antimatter propulsion, nuclear pulse propulsion, or even theoretical faster-than-light travel are avenues that might one day make such a journey possible.
Results: In the solar neighbourhood, we obtain a very precise estimate of the escape velocity, which is 497−8+8 km s−1. This estimate is most likely biased low, our best guess is by 10%. As a result, the true escape velocity is most likely closer to 550 km s−1.
To move out of the Milky Way, we need to travel atleast 500 light years vertically, and to be able to see Milky Way from space in its entirety, we need to travel 48,000 light years vertically.
Someday our little corner of the universe will have a ringside seat for one of the biggest events in the cosmos. Two billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda, our closest neighboring galaxy, will begin to fuse into one giant football-shaped galaxy.
No, no has ever gone out of our Milky way galaxy (not sure about Aliens). The Milky Way is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km ( about 100,000 light years or about 30 kpc) across. And we live on Earth in Solar System in Orion Spiral Arm, Milky Way Galaxy.
A solar mass white dwarf has a radius of only 8800 kilometers, so its surface escape velocity is about 5500 kilometers/second. A solar mass neutron star would have a radius of just 17 kilometers, so its surface escape velocity would be an incredible 125,000 kilometers/second!
The escape speed curve is measured at Galactocentric radii ranging from ~5 kpc to ~10.5 kpc. The local Galactic escape at the Sun's position is estimated to be ve(r⊙) = 580 ± 63 km s−1, and it rises towards the Galactic centre.
Coe et al. For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km).
For the moment, sending humans to the edge of interstellar space, let alone across the cosmic void to other stars, remains firmly in the realm of science fiction. But scientists and engineers are developing skills and technologies that might help us get there one day.
To get to the closest galaxy to ours, the Canis Major Dwarf, at Voyager's speed, it would take approximately 749,000,000 years to travel the distance of 25,000 light years! If we could travel at the speed of light, it would still take 25,000 years!
The fate of the Milky Way is certain: Six billion years from now it will merge with the Andromeda galaxy. The prediction is based on images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
Description. During the merger, stars and dark matter in each galaxy become affected by the approaching galaxy. Toward the late stages of the merger, the gravitational potential begins changing so quickly that star orbits are greatly altered, and lose any trace of their prior orbit.
Andromeda is larger than the Milky Way in terms of the distance it extends. However, the two galaxies are roughly comparable in mass, and it's hard to say which one is more massive.
Beyond the Milky Way, there are billions of other galaxies, each containing billions of stars and planets. Some of these galaxies are very far away, and we can only see them with powerful telescopes. Some of them are hidden behind our own galaxy, in a region called the "zone of avoidance".
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and recently left the solar system it is moving at roughly 38,000mph. So as a rough answer, 50 years. A bit less if we focussed on doing it as fast as poss.
To get to Pluto (which is 5 billion kilometers or 3 billion miles from Earth) in just 9.5 years, as New Horizons will, the spacecraft must travel very, very quickly. As a result, New Horizons will speed by Pluto at a velocity of about 43,000 kilometers per hour(27,000 miles per hour).
The edge of the observable universe is about 270,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. If you drive at a steady 65 miles per hour, it will take you 480,000,000,000,000,000 — that's 4.8 × 10¹⁷ — years to get there, or 35 million times the current age of the universe.
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