• Question: if you travelled at the speed of light for a year from planet earth where could you go?

    Asked by littleewok to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Hi @littleewok whereever there was that is 1 light year away! Can you tell I have no clue?!

    • Photo: Chris Cole

      Chris Cole answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      You wouldn’t get very far actually, in astronomical terms. You’d be exactly one light year away from earth, but you’d still have another three years to go before you reached our nearest neighbour Proxima centauri.

      Space is huge and is one reason why human spaceflight is such a problem. We don’t live long enough!!

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      You would be in the middle of nowhere. You would get past the edge of the solar system after about one hundredth of a light year, but you would be nowhere near the nearest star, alpha centuri, which is more than four light years away.

    • Photo: Jane Charlesworth

      Jane Charlesworth answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      The speed of light is round about a massive 670 million miles per hour, and there are about 8760 (24 x 365) hours in a year, so you would go nearly 6 trillion miles. Wow!

      But as others have said, space is so vast that while you would be a long way from Earth and even outside our solar system, you wouldn’t be close to anything else exciting.

      This is actually really cool to think about, because it means that the light we see when we look up at the stars has been travelling for thousands or even millions of years to reach our eyes.

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