What does our cosmic suburb look like?
Everyone obviously knows that the Earth revolves around the Sun, a star about 5 billion years old.
And that it is located in a spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, made up of hundreds of billions of other stars.
But let's realize for a moment the huge change in scale that we have just made: if a grain of light, the fastest object in the universe, takes about 8 minutes to reach us from the Sun, it would take 100,000 years to cross the galaxy from side to side (reason for which we measure distances in light years: the figures in kilometers quickly make you dizzy)!
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We are going to stop here on an intermediate scale.
The Sun is located in one of the spiral arms of our galaxy, just under 30,000 light-years from its center.
But above all, scientists have known for about twenty years that our star is located in a “vacuum pocket” 500 light years wide…
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