The vastness

The photo above (taken by the Hubble space telescope) is of NGC 3147, a typical spiral galaxy considered a fairly close neighbor of our own galaxy, being only 130 million light-years away.

To get a sense of how far that is, consider this.  Light travels at 186,282 miles per second, so that, for example, it takes one and a quarter seconds to cover the distance from the Moon to the Earth.

When the light that formed the above image left NGC 3147, the Tyrannosaurus rex did not yet exist on Earth.  By the time the T-rex evolved, that light had already been traveling through space toward us for almost fifty million years, and still had eighty million years to go before reaching the Hubble telescope.

That light was only halfway along its journey here when the K/T meteor impact wiped out the dinosaurs and cleared the stage for the age of mammals.

The New Horizons space probe, moving faster than a bullet, took nine and a half years to travel from Earth to Pluto, the outermost (known) planet of our solar system.  NGC 3147 is more than two hundred billion times further away than Pluto.

Yet by intergalactic standards, it's considered a close neighbor.

[Image found via Hackwhackers.]