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Week 15 Lecture & Reading Discussion_Introduction to General Astronomy (1)

Week 15 Lecture & Reading Discussion_Introduction to General Astronomy (1)

Q Part 1: Why are distant galaxies reddish in color compared to bluish-white nearby galaxies? Then, assume that you are traveling from the Milky Way to a distant galaxy in the Draco Cluster (~40 million ly away), how long will it take to arrive? And when you finally arrive at this distant galaxy, how far away will the Milky Way galaxy be? Part 2: When looking at an extremely distant galaxy, does it tell us about how the universe functioned in the past or present? Finally, would the accelerating expansion of the universe occur if it was composed entirely of matter (assuming dark energy did not exist)?

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Nearby galaxies appear white-bluish in color and as they move away in a uniform speed, the farther they reach, the more reddish they become, indicating that the color of the galaxy is directly proportional to the distance of the galaxy from where it is viewed. Assuming that I will be traveling at the speed of the New Horizon spaceship (16.26 km/s), then the time taken to reach Draco Cluster would be around 7.3*1026 years. If I would be traveling at the speed of light, then it would be approximately 40 million light years, so it all depends on the medium of my travel.