My Short Time on Vocal

British spelling

I joined Vocal to share my knowledge regarding the universe and life.

All of my stories should be easy to understand. And hopefully, some of them will be of interest to you.

I noticed a couple of bonuses were added to my wallet; one $10 bonus was for coming 2nd in Emerging Creators.

Another $5 bonus was for getting a top story, which I named "Our Incredible Eyes."

It's a good feeling to be recognised.

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Here is one of my articles.

The amazing speed of light.

British spelling.

In a vacuum, light travels at almost 300,000 kilometres per second.

Light travelling through the Earth’s atmosphere would be slowed down by an extremely small amount.

The speed of light is so important in many areas of physics.

So what is the speed of light? It works out at 18 million kilometres per minute, or 1,080 million kilometres per hour. Yes, that speed is a bit mind-boggling, to say the least.

Anything that has mass could never reach the speed of light; the vast amount of energy needed would be impossible to achieve.

Could it be possible that in the future we will be able to reach distant areas in space while travelling near the speed of light? I think we can rule that scenario out.

The most that we can hope for is to visit objects in our solar system, which is just our backyard.

The Parker Solar Probe was launched into space in 2018. Its mission is to study the sun and its outer corona. In 2025, it will make its closest approach to the Sun and is expected to achieve a speed of roughly 690,000 kilometres per hour.

But even at that speed, we are never going to get very far from our local area in space.

The next few lines will hopefully put the speed of light into some sort of perspective.

Light speed is 1,565 times faster than the maximum speed the Parker Solar Probe will be able to achieve.

Our natural satellite, the Moon, lies 384,400 kilometres from the Earth; light leaving the Moon would take just over one second to reach the surface of the Earth.

The circumference of our planet is just over 40,000 kilometres. If it were possible for light to zip around the Earth’s surface, it would do so 7.5 times every second.

The distance from the Earth to our local star, the Sun, is almost 150 million kilometres; that short journey for light takes 8.3 minutes.

Proxima Centauri, Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Proxima Centauri is a small, low-mass star located almost 40 billion kilometres away.

Not including the Sun, it is our nearest star neighbour, but light would still take over 4 years to travel the distance between the Sun and Proxima Centauri.

It may seem like Proxima Centauri is very distant, but in reality, it is just a step away when considering the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Light would take over 100,000 years to travel the width of the Milky Way.

But our galaxy is minuscule compared to that gargantuan area we call the universe.

With highly advanced telescopes, we can now see objects that are over 13 billion light-years away. It is very hard for us to comprehend these vast distances.

Imagine that for every year of those 13 billion years, the light from those extremely distant objects will have travelled 9.46 trillion kilometres towards us.

I could write down the number of kilometres, but it would be meaningless to most of us. Yes, they are mind-boggling astronomical distances.

The end.

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