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The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant that is exactly equal to 299,792,458 metres per second (approximately 300,000 kilometres per second; 186,000 miles per second; 671 million miles per hour).
The two-way speed of light is the average speed of light from one point, such as a source, to a mirror and back again. Because the light starts and finishes in the same place, only one clock is needed to measure the total time; thus, this speed can be experimentally determined independently of any clock synchronization scheme.
In this context, "speed of light" really refers to the speed supremum of information transmission or of the movement of ordinary (nonnegative mass) matter, locally, as in a classical vacuum. Thus, a more accurate description would refer to c 0 {\displaystyle c_{0}} rather than the speed of light per se.
To help compare different orders of magnitude, the following list describes various speed levels between approximately 2.2 × 10 −18 m/s and 3.0 × 10 8 m/s (the speed of light). Values in bold are exact.
They set a limit on the anisotropy of the speed of light resulting from the Earth's motions of Δc/c ≈ 10 −15, where Δc is the difference between the speed of light in the x- and y-directions. [33] As of 2015, optical and microwave resonator experiments have improved this limit to Δc/c ≈ 10 −18.
Kilometers Miles light-second 1 light-second 299 792 458 m: 2.998 × 10 5 km: 1.863 × 10 5 miles: Average distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 1.282 light-seconds light-minute 60 light-seconds = 1 light-minute 17 987 547 480 m: 1.799 × 10 7 km: 1.118 × 10 7 miles: Average distance from the Earth to the Sun is 8.317 light-minutes ...
By timing the eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io, Rømer estimated that light would take about 22 minutes to travel a distance equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit around the Sun. [1] Using modern orbits, this would imply a speed of light of 226,663 kilometres per second, [2] 24.4% lower than the true value of 299,792 km/s. [3]
In physics, natural unit systems are measurement systems for which selected physical constants have been set to 1 through nondimensionalization of physical units.For example, the speed of light c may be set to 1, and it may then be omitted, equating mass and energy directly E = m rather than using c as a conversion factor in the typical mass–energy equivalence equation E = mc 2.