Astronomers have discovered a huge filament of hot gas bridging four galaxy clusters. At 10 times as massive as our galaxy, the thread could contain some of the Universe’s ‘missing’ matter, addressing a decades-long mystery.
The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is only 25,000 ly from Earth. Assuming constant acceleration, and sufficient technology to protect and keep things running for all that time - no mean feat - reaching a substantial percentage of light should make that reachable within a hundred or so thousand light years, even with a flip and slow-down halfway.
Seque 1 is only 75k ly.
Andromeda is much farther; I didn’t catch it in the article, but I got the impression the strands were identified between the more local clusters.
…satellite galaxies != galaxy clusters; andromedia is 2.5 million light-years distant and the cluster in this study is about ten times that size, 23 million light-years across…
…for those distances we’re talking hundreds of millions of years at relativistic velocities, even billions…
Wouldn’t the ship itself perceive a lot less of that time compared to an external point of reference?
The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is only 25,000 ly from Earth. Assuming constant acceleration, and sufficient technology to protect and keep things running for all that time - no mean feat - reaching a substantial percentage of light should make that reachable within a hundred or so thousand light years, even with a flip and slow-down halfway.
Seque 1 is only 75k ly.
Andromeda is much farther; I didn’t catch it in the article, but I got the impression the strands were identified between the more local clusters.
…satellite galaxies != galaxy clusters; andromedia is 2.5 million light-years distant and the cluster in this study is about ten times that size, 23 million light-years across…