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It is estimated that light takes 100,000 years to travel the full distance across our galaxy, the Milky Way.

If light travels 3.0 x 100000000 m in 1 second, how long is the Milky Way?

Give your answer in standard form.

Verified Answer :

AL2006


Well, technically, you've only told us the time to travel across
our galaxy, so we don't have enough information to calculate 
anything about its length.

Fortunately, some of us are vaguely aware that our galaxy is
roughly round, at least in its plane.  So "across" means its diameter,
and that's the same in any direction through the center.

Relieved, we can now proceed to calculate:

               (3 x 10⁸ meter/sec) x (8.64 x 10⁴ sec/day)
                                              x (3.65 x 10² day/yr) x (10⁵ years)

            = (3 x 8.64 x 3.65 x 10¹⁹)  meters

           =         94.608 x 10¹⁹  meters

           =  946,080,000,000,000,000,000 meters

           (about  587,867,000,000,000,000,000 miles) .
 

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