How big is space? NASA expert answers

Photo Credit: NASA

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Space is really big - much bigger than you might think.

Driving to Pluto at highway speed would take about 6,000 years.

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Looking beyond our solar system means using a new distance unit called light-years.

Light travels 1,86,000 miles every second. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

The closest star to our Sun is about 4 light-years away.

Our Milky Way galaxy is around 1,00,000 light-years across.

There are hundreds of billions, maybe even a trillion other galaxies out there.

The observable universe is about 92 billion light-years wide, and it’s probably even bigger than that.

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