http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110528.html
The Mileage of Light (May 28 2011)
While driving, the astronomer Dennis Mammana looked at his odometer and realized that it read 186,282 miles. If you don't already know, this is the number of miles light travels in one second. In Dennis' case, it took him about thirteen years to travel this distance. I thought that this was a good example of just how quickly light travels and how much the quantities within our universe vary from the smallest molecule to the largest super-massive black holes and so on. This also gives me an idea of how truly vast and extensive the universe is considering that some of the objects in the sky that we can observe don't exist anymore but the light is just reaching us. If it took light a long time to travel that distance, I don't even want to know how truly far away those objects are. I can not fathom it even if you put a number on it.
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