Light travels at a speed of 299,792 km per second (186,282 mps). That’s fast. Jupiter is 778,500,000 km (483,737,000 miles) from the Sun. That’s far. To try to convey the vastness of space, Alphonse Swinehart created this animation to illustrate that even at the blistering speed of light, it takes over 43 minutes just to reach Jupiter. As Swinehart explains:
“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.”
And if you want to reach say, Neptune? Which is 4,503,000,000 km away. Well it would take a little longer, about 4 hours and 10 minutes!
