Fun facts about the speed of light:

 

• Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second! (186,282.4 m.p.s., to be exact.) According to Einstein, light is the speed limit in space, and nothing in the Universe can travel faster than light.

 

• Our sun is 8 light minutes away, so if it blew up right now, 8 minutes would go by before you knew about it.

 

• One light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles.

 

• It takes about 16 minutes for a radio signal to travel from Mars to Earth at the speed of light. (Mars is around 170,000,000 miles away.)

 

• You can slow down time by moving faster! Time goes slower the closer to light speed one travels. If you were traveling at the speed of light, time would stop altogether and you wouldn’t get any older. If you could somehow travel faster than the speed of light, (Einstein says you can’t, but what does he know), you would actually travel back in time! It sounds crazy, but laboratory experiments have shown this principle to be true. Here’s a fun poem you can use to teach kids about this concept:

 

There was a young girl called Bright
Who could travel much faster than light
She went out one day
In an Einsteinian way
And returned the previous night.