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Zach Berta-Thompson
Torres Fellow for Exoplanet Research
Astronomer at MIT
Cambridge, MA
The speed of light is
300,000 km/s
One light-nanosecond
is 30cm.
THE EARTH: 1/10th of a light-second all the way around
THE MOON: 1 light-second away
THE SUN: 500 light-seconds away (8 light-minutes)
JUPITER: 40 light-minutes away
SATURN: 75 light-minutes away
PLUTO: 5 light-hours away
PROXIMA CENTAURI: 4 light-years away
BETELGEUSE: 600 light-years away
THE ORION NEBULA: 1300 light-years away
THE MILKY WAY’S CENTER: 25,000 light-years away
THE ANDROMEDA GALAXY: 2,500,000 light-years away
THE WHIRLPOOL GALAXY: 25,000,000 light-years away
THE FIRST GALAXIES: 10,000,000,000 light-years away
THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND:
13,800,000,000 light-years away
But how?
Zach Berta-Thompson
GJ1132b: a rocky planet transiting a nearby low-mass star
GJ1132 is 12.04±0.24pc away.
RECONS parallax
(Jao et al. 2005)
MEarth astrometry
(Dittmann et al. 2014)
image: Jonathan Irwin
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
(Harvard astronomer, 1868-1921)
APOD
No. 1, 2001
HST KEY PROJECT
Farther galaxies move away from us faster!
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FIG. 1.ÈVelocity vs. distance for galaxies with Cepheid distances.
Velocities in this plot have been corrected using the Ñow model described
Freedman et al. (2001)
images drawn from:
NASA, ESA, Hubble Space Telescope, Astronomy Picture of
the Day, Starland, Golden Guide to Astronomy