Investigating the speed of light.
The distances in space are far too large to be measured in kilometres. It is a bit like marking the road distances in millimetres.
Instead astronomers use the light year. The light year is the distance a beam of light travels in one year.
You can use the fantastic Wolframalpha website to explore the distances in space and on Earth in terms of how quickly a beam of light will take to cover he distance.
All you have to do is type into the box light year. You will find the distance a light year in metres.
Try typing in:
Glasgow to Paris. You can equate the distance in terms of how long it would take light to travel this distance = 2.99milliseconds. So we could say that Paris is about 3 milli-light-seconds from Glasgow.
Try typing in Earth to Mars you`ll find that the distance between Earth and Mars is 9.6 light-minutes.
You can download a special worksheet which you can use with Wolfram Alpha.
Download worksheet here. (pdf)
WolframAlpha
Have fun converting distances into lightyears, lightminutes or even lightmilliseconds.
