How Long Would It Take to Travel the Galaxy?

Have you ever gazed at the night sky and wondered how long it would take to travel the galaxy?

The Milky Way galaxy is vast and incomprehensibly large, measuring about 100,000 light-years from end to end. A “light-year,” is defined as the distance that light travels in a year, which is around 9.46 trillion kilometers. Light year is a unit of measurement we use to understand scale of space which is quite massive.

To travel out of the Milky Way, we would need to travel atleast 500 light years vertically. And if we wanted to be able to see Milky Way from space in its entirety, we need to travel 48,000 light years vertically away from the galaxy.

Is it possible to leave the milky way?

Our most advanced spacecraft to date, the Parker Solar Probe, can travel at a speed of 700,000 kilometers per hour. Impressive as that speed might sound to us, it’s still extremely slow when you think about galaxy-sized distances. If we were to set out on a journey across our galaxy in the Parker Solar Probe, it would take more than 1.9 billion years to complete the trip.

To give that number some context, modern humans have been on Earth for about 200,000 years. So, the trip across the Milky Way would take almost 10,000 times longer than the entire span of human history!

Clearly, with the technology we have now, traveling across the Milky Way is beyond our reach. We’d need major breakthroughs in space propulsion and travel techniques before we could even begin to think about such an ambitious journey.