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.
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.
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!
Even if you could travel at the speed of light (300,000 kilometers, or 186,000 miles, per second), it would take you about 25,000 years to reach the middle of the Milky Way. If we could travel outside our galaxy and look back, this is what our Milky Way Galaxy might look like from above.
How long would it take to get to the Andromeda Galaxy? Forget it! Although it may be one of the closest galaxies to our own, since the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years distant it would take 2.5 million years to get there if (and it's a huge 'if') we could travel at the speed of light.
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.
To do so, you will need a speed of almost the speed of light, so in the reference frame of Earth, you will have spent just a tad more that 1000 yr to travel 1000 ly. i.e. 1000 years, 4 hours, and 23 minutes in Earth's reference frame.
It would take 500 years to travel 500 light-year distance at the speed of light.
"It's very unlikely," Matteo Ceriotti, an aerospace engineer and space systems engineering lecturer at the University of Glasgow in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. However, as Ceriotti explained, "unlikely" does not mean it's "impossible," and suggested a way it could theoretically be done.
Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years from Earth, a distance that would take about 6,300 years to travel using current technology. Such a trip would take many generations.
The light that travels the longest gets stretched by the greatest amount, and the object that emitted that light is now at a greater distance because the universe is expanding. We can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away precisely because of the expanding universe.
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.
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.
But while we don't have the means to definitively prove whether alternate universes do exist, and whether we could traverse borders to move from one to another, it's highly unlikely that a topic as stimulating as this will disappear anytime soon, either in science fiction or in real-life science.
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).
In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16.
How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C. : Krulwich Wonders... By some counts of human history, the number of humans on Earth may have skidded so sharply that we were down to just 1,000 reproductive adults. And a supervolcano might have been to blame.
Proxima Centauri b (or Proxima b), sometimes referred to as Alpha Centauri Cb, is an exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star to the Sun and part of the triple star system Alpha Centauri.
Unless we modify our collective behaviour and reduce our ecological footprint, it is possible that our activities will also lead to our own extinction. However, life on Earth would continue without us and biodiversity would return.
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).
Based on our current understanding of physics and the limits of the natural world, the answer, sadly, is no. According to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, summarized by the famous equation E=mc2, the speed of light (c) is something like a cosmic speed limit that cannot be surpassed.
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.
Galaxies may exist at that distance, but their light would be too faint for our telescopes to see. C. Because looking 15 billion light-years away means looking to a time before the universe existed.
In a vacuum, light travels at 670,616,629 mph (1,079,252,849 km/h). To find the distance of a light-year, you multiply this speed by the number of hours in a year (8,766). The result: One light-year equals 5,878,625,370,000 miles (9.5 trillion km).
Located just under 1,600 light-years away, the discovery suggests there might be a sizable population of dormant black holes in binary systems. The black hole Gaia BH1, seen in this artist's concept near its Sun-like companion star, is the closest black hole to Earth discovered so far.