Video: travel from the Sun to Jupiter at the speed of light

[Brian G Turner]

Confession - I fast forwarded through some.

But our SF writers might especially get a buzz out of this.

In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

 

[kythe]

I'm very impressed. It is always awe-inspiring to realize the vast immensity of space. This does make the speed of light seem slow. Even at that rate, space is a lot of emptiness. Even when something is there, like the planets and other objects, they seem small and they zoom by so fast if you blink you miss it.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Confession - I fast forwarded through some.

But our SF writers might especially get a buzz out of this.

Exactly why travel at the speed of light when we can just flick on our warp drives and do this long journey in an instant

 

[-K2-]

That's actually a stunning wake up call. The information is out there, yet until you put it in some relative perspective *snort*, it doesn't really hit home what the 'speed of light' is really like.

K2