Featured Image Credit: Instagram/@nowspacetime
Topics: News, Science, Space, World News
Kit Roberts
I think we've all come accustomed to the fact that light can travel pretty quickly, but how fast exactly?
For come context, light from the Sun takes just over eight minutes to travel the 148 million kilometers to Earth, and it manages the 4.5 billion km to the furthest planet in our solar system, Neptune, in a little over four hours.
Pretty speedy, then.
If you wanted those kind of speeds visualised, an Instagram account has demonstrated just how fast the speed of light is.
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Check it out below:
The video has shows just how quick the speed of light actually is, by superimposing it over Earth and our solar system, and the results are pretty impressive.
Something travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum around Earth would complete around 7.5 orbits per second at the Earth's surface.
That's a pretty astonishing fact.
But, because space is so huge, when we look at the stars we're looking years into the past as the light can take so long to reach us.
For instance, we see the bright star Sirius not as it is now, but how it was 8.6 years in the past because it's so far away.
While many things can travel at the speed of light, nothing that we currently know of travels faster than it.
So it's quite useful as a way to measure things, because nothing can possibly travel faster than that.
In response to the video, one person joked: "Light is slow AF."
Another said: "This video explanation of light speed may not be the hero we want, but it’s definitely the hero we need."
Meanwhile, a third penned: "Space blows my mind."
But just how fast is the speed of light?
Well on paper it's 299,792,458 metres per second.
To put that in perspective, in miles per hour that 671 million miles per hour, or 186,000 miles per second.
In short, it's quite fast. So fast that to the human eye it doesn't even register as travelling.
Confusingly, light itself doesn't always travel at the 'speed of light'.
Things can get in the way of it and hamper its movement. It's even possible in physics to slow light down so much that we can actually see it moving with the naked eye by directing a laser through extremely cold sodium atoms.
The speed of light that we all know and love is actually the speed of light in a vacuum, completely unhampered and undeterred.