Whether it’s the sunlight reaching the Earth or light from a star, its speed is beyond our imagination. It moves at a tremendous speed of 299,792 kilometres per second within the universe. To put this in perspective, if you are somehow capable of running at the speed of light, you can orbit around the Earth more than seven times in a single second. The same was illustrated by a YouTube video which provides an example of what humans think the speed could be like.
The YouTube video reveals that light takes approximately 0.13 seconds to travel the distance around the Earth. Before you know it, the video analyses the eight frames which constitute the journey. It was so fast that it almost didn’t move. The whole trip around the Earth looks like a tiny shake to the initial frame.
The video began in New York and headed southwest. The Pacific Ocean appears in the first two frames, then Brisbane, Australia, and finally the Indian Ocean in the next two frames. The sixth frame is set in the desert of Saudi Arabia, then Zimbabwe, Africa, and ultimately New York, where the circle is completed.
The route it takes and the sheer number of water-filled frames emphasise how much water makes up our world.
Additionally, the video compares it to the speed of sound, which is a lot slower than the speed of light. The intriguing aspect of all of this is that it provides us with a slight indication of the vastness of the universe.
The video, which gives a tour of the Earth in the blink of an eye, demonstrates how fast the light is. Now think about this: it takes the sunlight approximately 8 minutes to reach the surface of the earth while it takes approximately several years for light from stars to get to the earth.
A Further galaxy discovered is the JADES-GS-z13-0 which is approximately 33.6 billion light-years away from Earth. It has taken over 13 billion years to get here meaning we are seeing it as it was in the early stages of the universe itself.
The YouTube video, meanwhile, has 25 million views with users expressing their astonishment.
A user commented, “The fact that the Pacific Ocean took 2 frames tells a lot about how massive that thing is."
Another user mentioned, “What’s even crazier is that even with how fast light is, the sun is so far away that it still takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for sunlight to reach Earth."
“Now imagine travelling this fast for a billion years straight. And still not being able to reach the edge of the universe. Insane", said a user.
A user compared the speed of light with that of sound stating, “Crazy to think about but if you stood at the end of a long street and you made a very loud noise you could theoretically travel backwards all the way round the globe at light speed to the other side of the street and hear the noise you made."
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