-
Asked by woodwardhounsell to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 16 Mar 2012.
-
Mario Campanelli answered on 15 Mar 2012:
there is a joke, about Italian police officers, who are considered (at least in jokes) to be not too smart.
One of them said that they found a great way to travel and reach the sun. Another replies: isn’t it going to be too hot?
the first one: no worry, we’ll land there during the night!
clearly, star surfaces are way way too hot.
-
-
Clare Burrage answered on 15 Mar 2012:
The stars are a long way away! Even if you could travel at the speed of light (roughly two hundred thousand miles per second) it would take 8 minutes to reach the Sun (which is also a star) and over 15 years to reach our next nearest star.
The rockets we can build travel much, much slower than the speed of light and so we would never be able to reach the stars in a human lifetime. -
Elizabeth Pearson answered on 16 Mar 2012:
The nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is over 4 light years away. Even if we managed to get up to the speed of light it would take us 4 years to get there. Most of the stars are many hundreds of times further away so would take even longer. Longer than a human life span.
-
Ben Smart answered on 16 Mar 2012:
We (humans) don’t live long enough! Stars are so far away that even if we travelled in the fastest spaceship we can currently build, we’d still die of old age before we reached other stars.
Comments
Karen commented on :
I thought our next nearest star was about 4 light years away. Still far though.. and sorry – I will now return to the space zone – we have plenty of questions there too! 😉