The nearest star to our little old planet Earth is called Proxima Centauri, not Alpha Centauri as some might think, they discovered another little fella in the same group that is slightly closer - and don't get clever, apart from the Sun.
This little fella is 4.5 light years away - a light year is actually a measure of distance, not time.
This distance is how far a beam of light, travelling at the speed of light - I suppose light does actually travel at its own speed - will go in one year. And now I suppose you'd like to know how far that is, okay it's:
9,500,000,000,000 kilometres.
Cool, so if that little star is 4.5 of these away then it is - work it out yourself if you want to.
But obviously we can't travel at anywhere near the speed of light. Let's then consider something that can - a space shuttle.
You may not know that the space shuttle travels at 28,000 km/hr in order to stay in orbit. So if we send a space shuttle off to go and visit our neighbour Proxima and it poodles off out there travelling at its usual speed, then it will take how long exactly to get there? - 4,180,111.5 years -not sure who's going to be flying the thing, and can't see anyone hanging around long enough to make it, do you?
So all of this we know. We also know that apart from our little neighbour, Proxima that we can't even hope to consider getting to, that there are millions of stars out there in our galaxy beyond Proxima. And there are millions of galaxies out there beyond the Milky Way - that's the name of our galaxy. And there are millions and millions of stars in all of those galaxies.
We know all this.
What we don't know though is - why is it all there?
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