Our galaxy is on a collision course. In roughly 4.5 billion yearsIt is sometimes abbreviated Gy, Ga ("giga-annum"), Byr and variants. The abbreviations Gya or bya are for "billion years ago", i.e. billion years before present. The terms are used in geology, paleontology, geophysics, astronomy, and physical cosmology.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Billion_yearsAndromeda GalaxyThe Andromeda Galaxy (IPA: /ænˈdrɒmɪdə/), also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224 and originally the Andromeda Nebula, is a barred spiral galaxy with the diameter of about 46.56 kiloparsecs (152,000 light-years) approximately 2.5 million light-years (765 kiloparsecs) from Earth and the nearest large galaxy to the ...https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Andromeda_Galaxy
Our Milky Way is on a collision course with another spiral galaxy called Andromeda. Today Andromeda is visible as a speck of light in the night sky, but about 5 billion years from now, it will be tangled up with us. Our galaxy's spiral arms will disappear, and so will our supermassive black hole.
The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction. However, theoretically speaking, there is nothing to conclusively indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible.
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.
The closest galaxy is the recently discovered Canis Major dwarf galaxy, which is "only" 25,000 light-years away. So it would take 25,000 years to get there if you traveled at the speed of light. Actually, that's the amount of time it would take from the perspective of the outside world.
There's a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn't existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding).
Light-year is the distance light travels in one year. Light zips through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second and 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers) per year.
In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip would happen approximately 22 billion years from the present. In this scenario, galaxies would first be separated from each other about 200 million years before the Big Rip.
Even though certain features of the universe seem to require the existence of a multiverse, nothing has been directly observed that suggests it actually exists. So far, the evidence supporting the idea of a multiverse is purely theoretical, and in some cases, philosophical.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
Scientists now consider it unlikely the universe has an end – a region where the galaxies stop or where there would be a barrier of some kind marking the end of space. But nobody knows for sure.
SInce light-year is the distance travelled by the light in one year while travelling with the speed of light i.e. 3×108m/s 3 × 10 8 m / s . It would take 500 years to travel 500 light-year distance at the speed of light.
As the universe keeps ballooning, stars, including our own sun (after first becoming a red giant and incinerating the Earth), and even black holes will eventually radiate away all their energy, and the universe will go dark, forever.
At the current rate of solar brightening—just over 1% every 100 million years—Earth would suffer this "runaway greenhouse" in 600 million to 700 million years. Earth will suffer some preliminary effects leading up to that, too.
Finally, the most probable fate of the planet is absorption by the Sun in about 7.5 billion years, after the star has entered the red giant phase and expanded beyond the planet's current orbit.
Four billion years from now, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with our large spiraled neighbor, Andromeda. The galaxies as we know them will not survive.
No, the universe contains all solar systems, and galaxies. Our Sun is just one star among the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and the universe is made up of all the galaxies – billions of them.
The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there's the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions.
Our universe is also called the cosmos. It is originally a greek word. In early days it was thought that our Galaxy constituted the entire universe.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
This is the timeline of the Universe from Big Bang to Heat Death scenario. The different eras of the universe are shown. The heat death will occur in around 1.7×10106 years, if protons decay.
Observations suggest that the expansion of the universe will continue forever. The prevailing theory is that the universe will cool as it expands, eventually becoming too cold to sustain life. For this reason, this future scenario once popularly called "Heat Death" is now known as the "Big Chill" or "Big Freeze".
Since there is virtually nothing in space to scatter or re-radiate the light to our eye, we see no part of the light and the sky appears to be black.
So the furthest out we can see is about 46.5 billion light years away, which is crazy, but it also means you can look back into the past and try to figure out how the universe formed, which again, is what cosmologists do.
Re: How would you age at the speed of light
The simple answer is, anything moving through space at c, equal to the speed of light in a vacuum, experiences zero time flow. If you were to travel at the speed of light, you would experience no time.