We make our job easier when calculating the distances between space objects by using huge units such as light years. It represents the distance light travels in a year and is approximately 10 trillion kilometers. One way to understand this scale is to walk through it step by step.
The Moon is the closest astronomical object to us in the entire Universe. On average, this is approximately 380 thousand kilometers from Earth. Almost 30 Earths could fit side by side at this distance! It will take three days for astronauts to reach this satellite.
The Sun is approximately 400 times farther from the Earth than the Moon. That is, at a distance of 150 million kilometers. If we could build a road between the Earth and the Sun, the journey to the end would take about 170 years. This journey will take 17 years with a commercial aircraft.
Neptune, the farthest major planet from the Sun, is 4.5 billion kilometers or 30 AU away. (1 AU = 149,597,870.7 km). It took the New Horizons spacecraft more than nine years to get there, despite traveling at more than 50,000 kilometers per hour.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, so the most distant objects we can see are likely the same distance in light-years. However, space is expanding, and as light from distant objects reaches Earth, this expansion pushes them further and further away from us. The observable Universe is therefore estimated to be approximately 90 billion light-years across!
Source: Ferra
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