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A light-minute is 60 light-seconds, and so the average distance between Earth and the Sun is 8.317 light-minutes. The average distance between Pluto and the Sun (34.72 AU [5]) is 4.81 light-hours. [6] Humanity's most distant artificial object, Voyager 1, has an interstellar velocity of 3.57 AU per year, [7] or 29.7 light-minutes per year. [8]
A beam of light is depicted travelling between the Earth and the Moon in the time it takes a light pulse to move between them: 1.255 seconds at their mean orbital (surface-to-surface) distance. The relative sizes and separation of the Earth–Moon system are shown to scale.
Light-second: 0.002 — Distance light travels in one second — Lunar distance: 0.0026 — Average distance from Earth (which the Apollo missions took about 3 days to travel) — Solar radius: 0.005 — Radius of the Sun (695 500 km, 432 450 mi, a hundred times the radius of Earth or ten times the average radius of Jupiter) — Light-minute: 0 ...
The Planck time, denoted t P, is defined as: = = This is the time required for light to travel a distance of 1 Planck length in vacuum, which is a time interval of approximately 5.39 × 10 −44 s. No current physical theory can describe timescales shorter than the Planck time, such as the earliest events after the Big Bang. [ 30 ]
[3] [4] Given the rotational speed of the wheel and the distance between the wheel and the mirror, Fizeau was able to calculate a value of 2 × 8633m × 720 × 25.2/s = 313,274,304 m/s for the speed of light. Fizeau's value for the speed of light was 4.5% too high. [5] The correct value is 299,792,458 m/s.
Since 1983 the metre has been defined as the distance traveled by light in vacuum in 1 ⁄ 299,792,458 second. [7] This means that the speed of light can no longer be experimentally measured in SI units, but the length of a meter can be compared experimentally against some other standard of length.
Since the speed of light is a defined constant, conversion between distance and time of flight can be made without ambiguity. To compute the lunar distance precisely, many factors must be considered in addition to the round-trip time of about 2.5 seconds.
light-seconds: Solar radius is a ... 109 times the radius of the Earth, and 1/215th of an astronomical unit, the approximate distance between Earth and the Sun.