Well imagine going 500,000 times faster than a concorde and you have a speednearing 299,792,458 meters per second. This is the speed of light as it travelsthrough a vaccum which is so fast that if you were able to move at this speedyou could go around the earth 7 times in just 1 second, now that’s fast!

Obviously the speed of light passing through liquids and solids is slowerbut even then the speed of light is phenomenal. Many of you may also have heardof the concept of a light year, which represents the distance light wouldtravel in a complete year.

This extraordinary number comes out to around 9,460,000 million kilometres.The term is used extensively in astronomy to measure distances between planets,stars and other celestial bodies. The simple fact of the matter is thatdistances involved when it comes to discussing the universe are so huge thatyou need a better unit of measure to make it more understandable.

Lastly those of you who watch too many space movies e.g. star wars, startrek etc and are familiar with concepts like warp speed or hyperspace thenyou’re probably wondering when we’ll be able to travel at speeds like thoseshown in the movies. Well the simple answer is it’s highly unlikely that we’llsee anything like that in our lifetime however tolearn more about the researchgoing on in this area you can check out NASA’s section on breakthrough propulsion physics.

ScienceFacts

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