Knowledge

If Andromeda is the closest galaxy to us, why have we not started exploring it yet?

A lot of people have already given a sufficient answer but I really like talking about the scale of the Universe. Let me give you some comparisons so you can really appreciate the distances at play here:

Average distance between the Sun and Earth:

150,000,000 km (also known as an astronomical unit or AU)

Average distance between the Sun and Neptune:

4,500,000,000 km (30 AUs)

Distance between the Sun and the next closest star, Proxima Centauri:

4.24 light years (268,770 AU)

The diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy:

+100,000 light years (6,324,000 AU)

If the distance between the Sun and Neptune was shrunk down to one inch, the Milky Way would be the size of North America.

The Andromeda Galaxy is 2,500,000 light years away. That means it would take 2.5 million years to get there if you could travel at the speed of light. That’s 25 times the diameter of the Milky way.

So we have Sun to Neptune at one inch long (which took the Voyager 2 probe over a decade to travel) and the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy is 25 North Americas across. It would take Voyager 2 over 70,000 years to travel 4.24 light years. It would take 41 billion years for Voyager 2 to reach the Andromeda Galaxy.

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