Cool facts Universe: The speed of light is c=299,792,458 m/s. That’s the upper limit of speed. Nothing can go faster than that. The speed figure is very big in itself, so big that if someone hitched a ride on a beam of light, one will go 7 and a half rounds of Earth in just one second.
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That’s fast! Though the speed of light is very fast it’s not infinitely fast. Light does take time to travel between two places. This has some reasonable implications in real life.
Look around! We don’t see the world as it is but as it was, fractions of seconds ago. We see everything in the past. The light carrying the image of the face of the person sitting next to you has left his face, nanoseconds ago and therefore we see people around us in their past. Just a few nanoseconds in the past, this does not make any difference though.
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But when this simple nature of light is applied to the celestial bodies, things get serious and crazy. Some cool And dreadful facts based on actual science are mentioned below.
1. Sun is 8 light minutes away from the Earth (light from the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth). Therefore we see the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago. And therefore if something happens to Sun, say it changes its color from White to Green(just kidding), we would continue to see the plain old Sun for next 8 minutes.
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2. Mars and Earth have varying separation based on their positions in their orbits. When Curiosity Rover landed on the Mars, Earth was 14 light minutes away from the Mars. Interestingly, NASA streamed the live landing of the Curiosity Rover. But sadly it was not live at all. It had already landed 14 minutes ago. And for whopping 14 minutes, no one had the slightest of any idea that whether it landed successfully or not because it took 14 minutes for the signals sent by curiosity to reach Earth.
3. Our nearest star system, Proxima Centauri is 4.243 Light-years away. It is so far away that light from this star takes little over four years to reach Earth. And therefore looking at it is looking 4 years in the past. Interestingly if we look at the other way around then anyone from this star system, looking on Earth will see the Earth, four years back in time. They wouldn’t know who won the last US election or about Narendra Modi being chosen as Prime Minister of India.
4. Last but not least. If some alien life forms, 65 million light-years away from Earth know where to point their telescope they can still see “dinosaurs” roaming on our planet Earth. And more importantly, they can know what made dinosaurs to get wiped out completely.
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