If there are a million stars why don't we run in to any of them while we are in outer space?

Answer 1

Space is unimaginably big. The farthest that humans have been from the earth is the moon, which is 238,000 miles away. The sun is 400 times as far away as that. But if the distance from the earth to the sun is scaled so as to be one inch (2.54 centi-meters), then the distance to the *nearest* star would be over 4 MILES. In constrast, the farthest any of our probes have gone is, on this scale, only about 9 feet. Most of the time that humans are in space, they are only a couple hundred miles above the earth. This is completely insignificant in comparison to the distaces to other stars.

The distance to the nearest star other than the sun is hundreds of *billions* of times farther than the distance to the moon.

Answer 2

There are usually many lightyears (billions of miles) between stars. Other masses, such as planets and gas clouds also interfere with interstellar travel. However, the speeds we can currently cruise at make it highly unlikely we'll "run into" any of the other planets/systems/stars in the universe any time soon. Withing our solar system, complex ballistic tracking keeps us out of gravitational pulls from other masses.

Answer 3

The nearest star is thousands of times farther away than we have ever travelled in space. In the future, AI on ship's computers will chart a flight path that will steer clear of all stars.

Answer 4

Because there's even more empty space in between the stars. We have telescopic photos of galaxies colliding, and even in that situation, there's so much empty space that it is extremely unlikely that two stars will collide.

Answer 5

the nearest star is about four light years away and all the stars in our galaxy (Milky Way) are traveling in the same direction like spots on a spinning spiral.

Answer 6

First of all there are billions upon billions of stars. The reason why we don't run into one is because every one of them are spread out by billions upon billions of miles.