If a rocket could fly from the earth to the sun at a speed of 1,000 km per hour, about how many years would the trip take?

This lengthy journey is a matter of simple arithmetic, revealing the immense scale of our solar system. The sun is approximately 150 million kilometers away from Earth. To find the travel time, you divide this vast distance by the rocket's speed. At 1,000 kilometers per hour, the trip would take 150,000 hours. By dividing that number by 24 (for the hours in a day) and then by 365.25 (to account for leap years), you arrive at a travel time of about 17.2 years.

What makes this thought experiment so fascinating is the speed itself. While 1,000 km/h sounds fast, it's roughly the cruising speed of a commercial airliner. For space travel, this is exceptionally slow. Real spacecraft travel much faster. For instance, NASA's New Horizons probe, which flew past Pluto, left Earth's orbit at over 58,000 km/h.

Even more impressive, the Parker Solar Probe has used gravitational assists from Venus to reach speeds over 500,000 km/h on its mission to study the sun up close. This calculation powerfully illustrates that the distance to our own star is so great that even at speeds we consider high on Earth, the journey through the vacuum of space would last for more than a decade.