How Slow Does Light Travel? Find Out By Riding Light.

Do you realize that when you snap a picture of the last rays of the Sun, that light took about 8 min 20 sec to travel the 150 million Km or so from the Sun to Earth and to eventually expose your camera’s image sensor? And that’s with light travelling at 299,792,458 m/s (or 186,000 miles per second), which is pretty fast!

So, even though there’s nothing that can travel faster than light (except, if I understand correctly, the initial expansion of the universe itself), when you consider the vast scale of the universe, light seems to travel relatively slowly.

To illustrate how slow light travels in relation to the vast size of the universe, Alphonse Swinehart created a real-time animation that shows the hypothetical journey of a photon of light as it travels from the sun across a portion of the solar system. It gives you a small inkling of how vast the solar system, and the universe, really is.