SCIENCE ARTICLES

Posted By: Tarun

Well imagine going 500,000 times faster than a Concorde and you have a speed nearing 299,792,458 meters per second. This is the speed of light as it travels through a vacuum which is so fast that if you were able to move at this speed you 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 slower but even then the speed of light is phenomenal. Many of you may also have heard of the concept of a light year, which represents the distance light would travel in a complete year.

This extraordinary number comes out to around 9,460,000 million kilometers. The term is used extensively in astronomy to measure distances between planets, stars and other celestial bodies. The simple fact of the matter is that distances involved when it comes to discussing the universe are so huge that you 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, star trek etc. and are familiar with concepts like warp speed or hyperspace then you’re probably wondering when we’ll be able to travel at speeds like those shown in the movies. Well the simple answer is it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see anything like that in our lifetime however to learn more about the research going on in this area you can check out NASA’s section on breakthrough propulsion physics.