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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! in all co Ño bo ma Ño tur rad loc of qu the (To is 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