The speed of light, which is about 300 thousand kilometers per second in a vacuum, is the maximum with which a material object can move through space. Undoubtedly, this is incredibly fast, but it is also depressingly slow when communicating with spacecraft in orbits of planets other than Earth, with probes plying interstellar space, as well as studying objects and reaching them (in the future) outside the solar system.
In order to demonstrate the limited speed of light, a planetologist from the Center for Space Flight. NASA’s Goddard, James O’Donoghue, animated in three different animations that show how fast and slow photons can be.
Around the Earth
The first video illustrates how rapidly the light bends around the Earth.
The circumference of the Earth (at the equator) is about 40 thousand kilometers. If our planet did not have an atmosphere, then the photon, sliding on its surface, would have made almost 7.5 full revolutions in 1 second. And although the speed of light when watching a video seems incredibly fast, it also shows that it is finite.
From Earth to the Moon
The second animation covers a greater distance – from the Earth to the Moon.
The average distance between the Earth and the Moon is 384 thousand kilometers. This means that the moonlight that appears on our sky overcomes it in 1.255 seconds, and the way there and back (for data exchange with orbiters) takes 2.51 seconds.
It is worth noting that this time is increasing every day, since the moon moves away from our planet by 3.8 centimeters annually.
From Earth to Mars
And finally, the third video from James O’Donoghue reveals all the problems of the speed of light that astronomers around the world face daily.
When communicating space agencies with their research probes in orbit and the surface of Mars information is transmitted at the speed of light. However, it is too small to control them in real time mode, so the commands sent to the spacecraft must be carefully thought out, squeezed as much as possible and sent at the exact time to a certain point in space so as not to miss.
At the time of closest approach to Earth, the distance to Mars is approximately 54.6 million kilometers, so the time spent by light to overcome it in one direction is 3 minutes and 2 seconds.
Even more clearly, the problem of the speed of light manifests itself in communication with spacecraft, such as New Horizons and the Voyager brothers. And the situation is quite bad with the “communication” within the Universe, the observable boundary of which is located at a distance of 45.34 billion light years from us in any direction. Too much to display in simple animation.
-James O’Donoghue
Speed of light is not that fast? Emample animations
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