What it's like to travel away from the Sun at the speed of light

Mark Frauenfelder 9:24 am Thu May 19, 2016

Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

This video lets you hitch a ride on a photon emitted from the sun. It takes about 45 minutes to get to Jupiter.

In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

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