How Long Would It Take To Travel the Solar System? - ScienceNerds

How long would it take to travel the Solar System

How long would it take to travel through the solar system! well, we may be just a speck in the Milky Way and while the Milky Way may be just a speck on the Landscape of the universe, our solar system is still really really big as we're sure you remember from grade school the solar system is the group of local planets, asteroids and other small objects that orbit our Sun, travelling outwards from the Sun we have Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars after Mars comes the asteroid belts a chaotic cluster comprised mostly of rock and metal then comes the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn followed by the icy outer planets Uranus and Neptune beyond Neptune lie trans-Neptunian objects including things like comets, dust clouds, natural satellites and dwarf planets like Eris and Pluto finally and far beyond everything else there's the Oort cloud a theoretical cloud consisting of space dust and debris that marks the solar system's end.

Well experts firmly believe that this cloud exists no direct observations have been made of it, it's just too far away but just how far does our solar system spread?

How can you reach its outer edges and how long would it take luckily we have a nifty little device called Voyager one, offering up a point of reference traversing the outer reaches of our solar system as we speak the Voyager 1 space probe was launched by NASA on September 5th 1977 and is currently still travelling at around35,000 miles per hour, it reached Saturn its primary target in November 1980 but on August 25th 2012 nearly 35 years after launch it made even greater history by becoming the first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium( a fancy term for the space between star systems in a galaxy).

More specifically Voyager 1broke from the reach of the sun's solar winds and entered into deep space, currently it's at a distance of 21 points who bill in kilometre from the Sun and is so far away from us that it takes a radio signal travelling at the speed of light roughly 17 hours to beam between the spacecraft and our home planets it sounds like a lot right?  well, one of the monumental achievements at Voyager one should never be underestimated we're still very far from making an even semi significant dent in the solar system as a whole it would take Voyager1 another 300 years just to reach the inner edge of the interstellar Oort cloud and up to 40 thousand years to preach the cloud and finally break free from our solar system completely in truth the solar system and space, in general, is just way too big for earthly measurements like miles and meters to measure distance in space astronomers use something called astronomical units with one unit equaling the average distance from Earth to the Sun or 150million kilometres.

If you were to some  how drive a car to the Sun at highway speeds of a hundred kilometers per hour you'd eventually reach your destination in 1,500,000 hours or 171years so no one's surviving that but let's say you splashed the cash pulled some strings and took the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft in the world the Lockheed sr-71 Blackbird traveling at constant top speed it would take you just 4,02,492 hours to reach the Sun or just under five years in contrast definitely doable but let's be serious the distance from the earth to the Sun is infant is more when compared to the size of the entire solar system way out there is everyone's favorite dwarf planet Pluto ranges from thirty to forty nine astronomical units away from the Sun so at its average distance it'salmost six billion kilometres away, light traveling from the Sun takes about five and a half hours to reach Pluto, driving a car at highway speeds it would take you six thousand eight hundred and forty nine (6849) years but as we've established the solar system extends far beyond Pluto the outer edges of the Oort cloud area about 100,000 astronomical unit way or about 1.87 light-years or 17trillion kilometers give or take amazingly the sun's gravity can capture objects as far out as 2 light years away meaning that the outer part of the Oort cloud is still theoretically shaped bu the sun's gravity just beyond the clouds outer edges is the half way point between our Sun and the next nearest star Proxima Centuri beyond that you're swapping systems so in pouring astronomical terms it'll take you nearly2 years(2 light years) to reach the outer boundary of our solar system if you were travelingat the speed of lights but we can't do that can we let's hop back into our hypothetical space car and go for the ultimate cruiseel ! you know what let's do one better, let's forget the standard highway driving and up the stakes let's pretend we're in the fastest street-legal car in the world the Bugatti Veyron and let's imagine we can travel at its max speed of 431 km/h heading for the Oort cloud traveling at the top speed of the fastest car in the world it'd be 4 and1/2 million years before you finished your trip and that's without stopping for fuel or snacks.

Now let's again pilot the fastest ever aircraft the Lockheedsr-71 blackbird the blank bids eight times faster than a Veyron at some speed so the trip does shorten but it still takes you an eye-watering 550,000 years to reach the fabled finish line finally let's say we hitched a ride on NASA's New Horizons probe which left earth at a staggering and record-breaking 58,000 536 kilometres per hour it took this probe nine years to fly by Pluto so even if it continues its unprecedented pace it won't breach the Oort cloud for another thirty thousand years or more.

How long it takes to cruise the solar system depends entirely on what you want to cruise in just your standard supercar 4.5million years in a hi-tech spacecraft five hundred and fifty thousand years on a NASA probe and the fastest object ever launched from Earth thirty thousand no matter what you travel in you'd be long dead and space dust before you'd even consider the Oort cloud of course if you chose to travel at light speed you're looking at around only one thousand days but,  that's impossible and be as cheating so yeah the solar system is pretty big and remember it's just one small speck in the Milky Way which is just a tiny grain in the grand scheme of the entire universe so next time you're complaining about your daily commute remember this article and relax.

~sciencefreak