What makes light travel so fast

H ow fast does light travel through fiber optic cables? W hat travel faster, Your thought or light? H ow long does it take light to travel to Earth from the Sun? T elescopes are taking pictures of galaxies 70 million light years away. If there is nothing faster then the speed of light then how come we can take pictures of things so far away?

W hat would light look like if you went the exact same speed as light? H ow many earth years would it take to travel one light year. W hat travels faster than the speed of light? W hy are insects so attracted to light?

W hat is something that travels faster than light? Ask away and we will do our best to answer or find someone who can. All it can see is a steady amount of light. Speaking of how fast the fields are wiggling, they can wiggle at different rates.

When the fields are wiggling about ,,,, times every second, your eye sees red light. If your eye looks at fields which are wiggling about twice that fast, or about 1,,,,, every second, the light looks blue. All of the colors of the rainbow are due to the fields wiggling at slightly different rates.

Visible light is not the only phenomenon due to wiggling electric and magnetic fields. The reason you hear music from a radio station is that your radio can detect electric and magnetic fields traveling through the air which are only wiggling about ,, times every second.

If you tune to For The rate of wiggling is called the "frequency. This is nowhere near as fast as the wiggling in visible light. But radio waves and visible light are very similar - they are both waves of electric and magnetic fields, which just happen to be wiggling at different rates. Therefore, they both travel at the speed of light. Visible light, ultraviolet light, infrared radiation, radio waves, X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves, and radar waves are all made up of electric and magnetic fields wiggling at different rates, and they all travel at the speed of light.

Now, I mentioned earlier that light is a complicated phenomenon. I am looing for an explanation that is brief if possible. Location I think I'm in Florida, but I'm not sure any more. Because it's "light". If it was "heavy", it would travel slower. Brief enough? It doesn't travel "so fast".

It travels the normal speed it is meant to. Repondering Senior Member. Location Nebraska, USA. Visible light, all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, travel at lightspeed Why does matter bend spacetime through gravity? Why is there something rather than nothing?

When did time start? There are no brief explanations fmdog. Judycat Senior Member. Location Pennsylvania. Photons are constantly trying to catch a wave. Location Sydney, Australia.

I was going to say "to get to the other side of the road" but how about light travels so fast because unlike sound, it does not require a physical medium for transmission. It can pass easily through the vacuum of space. It slows down when it enters earth's atmosphere and this is what causes refraction bending of light rays and separation of the rays into the visible spectrum i. Em in Ohio Senior Member. Warrigal said:. You all left out the concept of "time". Repondering said:.

Agreed, when we figure what gravity is perhaps some answer will come with the answer. And as a result, the energy required to move the object would also become infinite. That means if we base our understanding of physics on special relativity, the speed of light is the immutable speed limit of our universe — the fastest that anything can travel. Although the speed of light is often referred to as the universe's speed limit, the universe actually expands even faster.

The universe expands at a little more than 42 miles 68 kilometers per second for each megaparsec of distance from the observer, wrote astrophysicist Paul Sutter in a previous article for Space.

A megaparsec is 3. Special relativity provides an absolute speed limit within the universe, according to Sutter, but Einstein's theory regarding general relativity allows different behavior when the physics you're examining are no longer "local. That's the domain of general relativity, and general relativity says: Who cares! That galaxy can have any speed it wants, as long as it stays way far away, and not up next to your face," Sutter wrote. And neither should you.

Light in a vacuum is generally held to travel at an absolute speed, but light traveling through any material can be slowed down. The amount that a material slows down light is called its refractive index. Light bends when coming into contact with particles, which results in a decrease in speed, according to an explainer article from the Khan Academy. Related: Here's what the speed of light looks like in slow motion. For example, light traveling through Earth's atmosphere moves almost as fast as light in a vacuum, slowing down by just three ten-thousandths of the speed of light.

Light can be trapped — and even stopped — inside ultra-cold clouds of atoms, according to a study published in the journal Nature. More recently, a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters proposed a new way to stop light in its tracks at "exceptional points," or places where two separate light emissions intersect and merge into one. Researchers have also tried to slow down light even when it's traveling through a vacuum.

A team of Scottish scientists successfully slowed down a single photon, or particle of light, even as it moved through a vacuum, as described in their study published in the journal Science. In their measurements, the difference between the slowed photon and a "regular" photon was just a few millionths of a meter, but it demonstrated that light in a vacuum can be slower than the official speed of light.

Science fiction loves the idea of "warp speed. But while faster-than-light travel isn't guaranteed impossible, we'd need to harness some pretty exotic physics to make it work. Luckily for sci-fi enthusiasts and theoretical physicists alike, there are lots of avenues to explore. All we have to do is figure out how to not move ourselves — since special relativity would ensure we'd be long destroyed before we reached high enough speed — but instead, move the space around us.

Easy, right? One proposed idea involves a spaceship that could fold a space-time bubble around itself.