The Speed of Light

1.      Earth’s view of the universe is a reflection of light from what distant objects looked like when light bounced off them in the past.

 

If you were at the center of the galaxy looking at Earth, you would be seeing what it looked like 30,000 years ago. 

 

If light from the middle of our the Milky Way takes 30,000 years to get to Earth, than a spaceship would have to travel at the speed of light for about 30,000 years to get to the center of the galaxy.

 

 

2.      The speed of light is 5,880,000,000,000 or 5.88 trillion miles per year, meaning that light goes 186,282.4 miles per second, 11,176,944 miles per minute, and 670,616,640 miles per hour.

 

A bolt of lightning travels at about 270,000 miles per hour, or about .0004% as fast as the speed of light.

 

So far the fastest man made object has been a Voyager spacecraft, which has traveled at about 35,000 miles per hour or about 13% as fast as a bolt of lightning.

 

 

3.      If a spaceship could travel 250,000 miles per hour without stopping or hitting anything, it would take at least 11,276 years to get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, where there may be at least a 99.99% chance that there won’t be a habitable planet orbiting around it. 

 

At 250,000 miles per hour, it would take 80,547,945 years to get to the center of the Milky Way.