Space is not that far….
If you travel upwards in your car at 60 mph, you can reach space in just over an hour! From the earth’s surface, space is just 100 km, so don’t be under illusion that the space is too far.
Essentially space is made up of satellites, planets, stars, solar systems and galaxies. There are so many other wonders like black holes, nebulae, etc. Here at SPACE STN we will cover all these space elements in details, but first, we will look at the building blocks of space.
Universe
Imagine a cake tin filled with walnut cake batter placed inside your oven. Think of yourself on Earth as a piece of a walnut; over time the heat starts cook the batter which results in the mixture expanding. The walnuts retain their shape but the batter expansion results in everything around the walnut piece moving away from it at a constant rate. The batter can be seen as our current Universe; it is expanding as you read this and everything in the Universe is moving away from us constantly.
This expansion speed has been estimated to be 70km per second per megaparsec. Let’s break this absurd figure: if we just said 70km per second that is easier to fathom. Adding the ‘per megaparsec’ means a distance of 3.3 x 10^6 light years. So an object one megaparsec away from earth is moving at a speed of 70km per second, if this same object is 2 megaparsecs away from Earth, it will be 140km per second. If this is all still confusing for you, do not fret as all you really need to know is that this measurement basically tells us the expansion speed increases the further away it is from us on Earth.
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