The Universe - Light Speed

Space

 Speed & Light

If we are to understand Space we need to take a closer look.

When we look into the night sky above us, we are looking as it was hundreds of years ago, as the light has to travel thought space down to us on Earth.

Nothing is faster than light

Let us look at different speeds on earth.

An Olympic Runner can run at 28mph.

A Racehorse can get speeds of 50mph.

A Rice Car can get speeds of 240mph.

A Jet Fighter with speeds of 1000mph.

The Space Shuttle in Orbit at speeds of 17,000mph.

The fastest man made object to date is the New Horizons probe, which was launched on 19 January 2006 and is a NASA robotic spacecraft mission currently en route to the dwarf planet Pluto. Speed 52,000mph.

It will arrive at Pluto on 14 July 2015

So how far would we get if we traveled around the Universe in a car, travelling at 100mph?

If we travelled in a car at 100mph it would take us 30 hours to travel coast to coast across America.

If we travelled in a car at 100mph to our moon, it would take us 14 weeks.

And if we travelled to Neptune which is the eighth planet from the Sun in our Solar System. It would take us 31,000 years. That some ride.

Light & Speed in Space

Light travels at different speeds depending on the
density of what it is traveling through.

In a vacuum, such as space, it travels at 186,282.397 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second.

It takes 499.0 seconds or 8.5 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth, a distance called

1 Astronomical Unit (AU).

If the Sun were to disappear, we on Earth wouldn't know
it for eight minutes after the event.

Light-travel time refers to the distance light travels over a given time.

Light travels at a speed of 299,792,458 km/sec (186,322,397 miles/sec).

At that speed, the light-year becomes a convenient unit of distance in the Milky Way.

Speed of Light

669,600,000 miles per Hour x 24 Hours.

16,070,400,000 miles per day x 365 Days

5,865,696,000,000 miles

= 1 Light Year

It takes 499.0 seconds for light to travel from the Sun
to the Earth, a distance called 1 Astronomical Unit. *

Earth's circumference at the equator is very close to
25,000 miles.

So light takes 1 second to travel once around the
earth, assuming an orbital path 59 thousand miles above
the earth.

This gives some idea how of what the speed of light
really means. *

At the equator, light would circle the earth almost 7.5
times in one second.
These examples including light circling the earth have
to be understood as rough ways to begin understanding
the magnitude of light speed.

Light would never behave this way naturally when
traveling around the earth. In fact, in the examples
one could assume that since the observed light is not
able to escape earth's gravity, then earth is (in the
examples) a black hole.

Earth's gravity comes nowhere even remotely close to
great enough to qualify earth as a black hole.

Licenses