Anupam Dhungana

Published On: July 12, 2018 10:05 AM NPT By: Anupam Dhungana

Space travelling Limited to The Local Group

Space travelling Limited to The Local Group

Humankind has made a lot of progress in the recent years. We have come to discover things never imagined before. The most fascinating of all is the finding of our own universe. In finding these answers, we also uncovered chilling secrets of our existence. 

Our galaxy is a spiral galaxy of an average size of about a million light years in diameter consisting of billions of celestial matters with a super-massive black hole at its centre.  With our current technology, sending a human to our nearest star would take thousands of years. Along with the Andromeda galaxy and other dwarf galaxies, we are a part of “The Local Group”, a region in space about ten million light years in diameter. Our local group is one of the hundreds of galaxy groups in the Laniakea Supercluster, which in itself is one of the millions of superclusters that make up our observable universe. So, even if humanity was to develop a technology traveling at the speed of light, how far would we possibly reach? Sadly, we’d only limit ourselves to the edges of the local group. 

However, the local group only represents the observable universe; it only occupies 0.00000000001% space. Let that number sink in. Why can’t we travel further you ask? Because the universe is moving at a rapid speed that us humans can never match. Even if we were to travel further from our local group, all that we would encounter is empty spaces. While gravity is pulling the galaxies in our local group towards each other, everything else is moving farther away. There will come a time when we can see nothing of the universe apart from the galaxies from our local group because even photons (light particles) won’t be able to reach us. 
Yet, we have the incredible luck to exist at the perfect moment in time to see not only our future but also our distant past. As isolated and remote the local group is, we can perceive the entire universe, grand and spectacular as it is right now. 

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