Andrew Solway has been a freelance editor, writer and project manager since 2001. He has written over 100 books for children and overseen the production of at least 100 more. His book Rome in Spectacular Cross-section won the UK Literacy Association’s award for best non-fiction children’s book of 2004 and was shortlisted for the 2005 Blue Peter Book Award.
"You could say that my job is to be professionally curious. I get curious about odd things. The other week I was curious about space, and I wondered: how long would it take to get to the nearest star by bus? (Not the Sun, the nearest star after that.) To answer the question, I had to find out lots of things. What is the nearest star? How far away is it? What is a light year in kilometres or miles? Once I started looking for answers, I found out some interesting stuff. I thought Alpha Centauri was the nearest star, but it turns out that it is actually a star system, with three stars in it. The nearest of the three is a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri.
"So how long would it take to get there by bus? Well, if you turn light years into miles, the distance to Proxima Centauri is about 25 trillion miles.
If the bus driver really put their foot down, and we managed
60 mph
all the way, I worked out it would take about 47 million years.
"Anyone for a ride?"
