Category Archives: Light

The Speed of Light

Posted on January 26, 2013 by juliettealper

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ The speed of light is a fascinating yet confusion concept. People frequently hear the term “lightyear” and assume that it is a measurement of time, but instead it is a measurement of distance. A lightyear is defined as how far light travels in a year. If someone was able to travel at the speed […] Continue reading →

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Faster than the Speed of Light

Posted on January 26, 2013 by zvgio

Everyone knows that the speed of light is fast; “faster than the speed of light” is a common colloquialism. Thanks to almighty science, we know that light travels at 299,792,548 meters per second, compared to 27m/s for a car traveling 60mph. Due to human perception times, a speed of this magnitude makes light’s travel seem […] Continue reading →

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The Speed of Light

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Will K

Even looking through a telescope, outer space can be very daunting. There is a seemingly endless distance between us and even the closest stars. At 39,900,000,000,000 kilometers away, the nearest star to our own Sun is Proxima Centauri of the Alpha Centauri star system. This distance is so enormous that it takes 4.22 years for […] Continue reading →

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Feeling a Bit Slow?

Posted on January 25, 2013 by ndtidol

Look in any physics textbook and the speed of light will be listed: approximately 300,000,000 meters per second. That’s a big number, but what exactly does it mean? Well, to […] Continue reading →

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Near Speed of Light Travel in the Atmosphere

Posted on January 25, 2013 by fathomingthestars

When physics classes learn about relativity, typical problems involve calculating relative velocities, masses, or distances for objects moving near the speed of light, 3 * 10^8 m/s.  These objects might be objects like spaceships, travelling in outer space, but they are often more common objects like cars and trains, or even baseballs.  The two different […] Continue reading →

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Once in a Blue Moon

Posted on January 25, 2013 by a2megal

Ok, so literally a blue moon is actually when two full moons are seen in a single calendar month, but what I am talking about today isn’t totally off topic because it is something that really is pretty rare: eclipses. As we learned recently that there are two general types of eclipses, a solar and […] Continue reading →

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King of the Galaxies

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Megan C

It’s hard to imagine things on a galactic scale. I have trouble just picturing how big the Earth really is. Now try imagining something larger than Earth, larger than the Solar System, and larger than our entire galaxy. That’s this guy, NGC 6872. It’s a spiral galaxy five times the larger than the Milky Way. It […] Continue reading →

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If light travelled really slow…

Posted on January 15, 2013 by ibrahim2016

The speed of light is one of the fundamental constants in the universe (along with the Gravitational constant, permitivitty etc.). Changing any constant even slightly will have deadly consequences. But if we manage to survive (somehow), we would find ourselves in a very ‘interesting’ universe. The constant for the speed of electromagnetic waves ‘c’ has […] Continue reading →

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