Flying From Earth To The Andromeda Galaxy

Do you know what's nice about living in the age of technology? We can simulate things that we could never physically do. Sometimes I really want to drive to our neighboring galaxy Andromeda, which is right over here. But then I remember I can't do that. There's no road to Andromeda. And they say capitalism breeds innovation. And it's also 2 million light years away, so it would take around 27 trillion years to drive there. But lucky for us, I have granted us the ability to travel faster than light. So instead of this video being 2 million years long, it's going to be roughly 8 to 10 minutes, hopefully. First, we're going to go interstellar. We will travel through the stars surrounding Earth. Then we will continue flying through our galaxy until we reach intergalactic space. Here we will see plenty of other galaxies surrounding us, each with roughly 100 billion different solar systems. But we're going to fly past those other galaxies and go directly to Andromeda. Then once we're there, we're going to fly around some of the stars in the galaxy, and we will visit a solar system as well, just for fun. And to top it all off, we will fly to the center of the Andromeda galaxy to visit the supermassive black hole at its core. Let's get a look at our planet while we are flying away. It's kind of crazy to think that everybody watching this video is somewhere on this sphere, floating through space. All 8 billion humans, 700 million dogs, 600 million cats, 3 trillion trees, 3.5 trillion fish, 20 quadrillion ants, and many more life forms all call this planet home. It's everything we know. And yet our home is just a little grain of sand floating in an ocean. But to us, this grain of sand means everything. It's kind of therapeutic watching Earth shrink away in the distance. All your problems and life stresses just seem to vanish alongside Earth. It reminds us how much larger reality is than our tiny little planet. You see that glowing dot at the bottom of the screen? That's actually our moon. It's much farther away than most people think. It's actually 384,000 kilometers away, to be exact. You could fit every single planet in our solar system in between the Earth and our moon. Now we can see most of our solar system. The sun is the bright spot, obviously, and the points of light surrounding it are all the planets orbiting it. Our rocket ship is already traveling faster than the speed of light. But now we're entering interstellar space, so we're going to have to increase our speed a lot. Now you can see the space between stars. The distance between our sun and its nearest neighboring sun is about 4.25 light years. But let's put that into perspective, just how big that distance is. On a normal passenger airplane, if you were to fly to our nearest star, it would take you just over 5 million years. Every spot of light you see is a solar system in our galaxy. There isn't a single precise answer for how many planets each solar system has, but current estimates suggest that planets are very common, with most stars having at least one and possibly several planets. In our entire Milky Way galaxy, there is an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion stars. And if each star has an average of just over one planet, that would mean there are hundreds of billions of planets just inside our galaxy. As we begin to exit the Milky Way, let's turn our spaceship around and get one view of our entire galaxy, the home of hundreds of billions of solar systems. Never gets old looking at this view. Our entire galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across. It's incredibly big. And remember, the distance to the closest star to our solar system is 4.25 light years away, and that distance would take us just over 5 million years to travel on a passenger plane. So imagine how long it would take you to fly across 100,000 light years. Welcome to intergalactic space. Every dot of light you see is now a galaxy, each one home to roughly 100 billion solar systems. Our observable universe has around 2 trillion galaxies in it. I previously made a video flying through our entire observable universe, so if you want to watch that video next, it should pop up on the screen at the end of this video. Now, what you're seeing is just a very small portion of the entire observable universe. As we look around us, we can spot tens of thousands of galaxies. And as I said before, each of those galaxies has around 100 billion stars. So the total amount of stars that we can see around us is roughly 3 to 5 quadrillion. That is how many unique solar systems you are seeing, each one with its own planets, moons, and possibly even life. It's kind of crazy how our local neighborhood of space can hold so many worlds. Can you imagine the strange planets out there waiting to be discovered? Let's look back and see if we can spot our Milky Way galaxy. There it is. That is literally where you are watching this video right now. The same place where people shout, My country is the greatest! I'm the richest person in the world! And where we all fight over our gods. From out here, all of that just feels so small. It's almost impossible not to laugh at ourselves and realize that we are just really dramatic animals. Earlier I said that we can see roughly 3 to 5 quadrillion stars around us. Now this is an insanely large amount of space. But compared to the entire observable universe, this little portion that we are currently looking at is tiny. This is only 0.0000015% of the entire observable universe. That is one part in 67 million. Here's a mind-blowing analogy to help you understand this better. Imagine the entire observable universe is the surface of your body. This patch of 3 to 5 quadrillion solar systems is the equivalent to 0.025 square millimeters of your body. That's the width of two and a half human hairs. Look at the hairs on your arm right now and line up two of them. The width of those two hairs to your entire body is what this amount of space is to the entire observable universe. We've almost completed our journey, our two and a half million light year road trip. And here it is, the Andromeda galaxy. But before we dive straight into the core, take a look around. Notice all those smaller galaxies clustered nearby? Those are Andromeda's satellite galaxies. They're gravitationally bound to Andromeda, kind of like little siblings tagging along. Andromeda itself is huge. It's about 220,000 light years across, more than twice the size of the Milky Way. While our galaxy has about 100 to 400 billion stars, Andromeda is estimated to have about a trillion. We're actually on a collision course with Andromeda. In about four and a half billion years, our galaxy and this galaxy will merge into one gigantic galaxy. Astronomers even have a name picked out for it. Milkomeda. And yes, this means in the distant future, our descendants will be living inside a galaxy far, far bigger than either one today. The galaxy's core is super bright. That's because it's packed with hundreds of millions of stars crammed together in one region. The light of all those stars merges into this glowing heart of the galaxy. And at the very center, hidden behind that brightness, lies a supermassive black hole, millions of times the mass of our sun. That will be our final stop. What was just a tiny patch in our sky is now an entire galaxy. Every second, we are flying past millions of solar systems. Just think about all the potential worlds that are just sweeping by us in a blink of an eye. Okay, let's slow ourselves down a bit. The acceleration is super sensitive since we are going so fast, and that's why it's a little bit jumpy. Perfect. Now, let's slowly turn our view around, and see if we can spot the Milky Way galaxy from here. There's our home galaxy, two and a half million light years away from us. Just over 100 years ago, we thought our galaxy was the entire universe. We didn't think anything else was outside of it. That all changed when Edwin Hubble revealed Andromeda was a completely separate galaxy, millions of light years away. We used to think it was just a nebula inside the Milky Way, but in 1924, Hubble proved this idea wrong. We have two more stops left. First, we're going to find a star nearby and explore its solar system. Then, we will go to the center of the Andromeda galaxy, and see the supermassive black hole that is over 100 million times the mass of our sun. Here's a random star I found, with plenty of planets orbiting around it. In this simulation, we can visually track the orbits of these planets with these green lines surrounding the star. This solar system is packed with planets and asteroids, and as we zoom out, notice how vast these orbits really are. Even though they look close together, in reality, the distance between these planets is mind-boggling, millions, sometimes billions of kilometers apart. You can start to see just how large the average solar system is. And keep in mind, this is one solar system out of one trillion. Now for our final destination. At the heart of nearly every galaxy is something strange, one of the most mysterious objects in the universe. A place where the rules of reality begin to break down, and where gravity is so intense that anything that falls inside can never escape. Here, space is stretched and twisted, and time itself slows to a crawl. If you enter it, the rules of space and time reverse into each other. We call it a supermassive black hole. This black hole is surrounded by material, gas and dust from the nearby stars it's been devouring. The massive amount of particles that fall into this black hole smash into each other and heat up so much, that at both poles, material is ejected out at nearly 95% the speed of light. The closer we move toward the black hole, the stranger time becomes. From our perspective, time slows dramatically. But if we looked outward, back at the rest of the universe, we'd see it racing ahead, unfolding in fast forward. The extreme amount of radiation coming from the black hole is so strong that it interferes with our instruments, giving our camera this pixelated look. It's one of the brightest, most violent regions in the universe. There's no turning back now. Our spaceship would have to travel at nearly the speed of light to escape the gravitational pull from the black hole. And once we fall in, there's no way out. It's the eternal prison of reality. No one knows what lies inside a black hole. It could literally be the end of everything. Or the beginning of something we can't yet imagine. All the music in this video was made myself, including this outro song. If you want to listen to my music, find it on all platforms under the name Royal2k. I also put out a video over how I made the sound effects for the black hole in this video. You can watch it for free on my Patreon, just click the link in the description and press the join for free button, and you can watch all the behind the scenes clips I post there. Thank you for watching.