Without light our universe would be a very dark and scary place to live in. Here are some interesting facts about different light.
How light travels
Light is the fastest thing in the universe. Light travels 983,571,056 feet every second. Light can get all the way from you to the Moon in the time it takes you to say, “Woahh! Hold on!”
A beam of light can get from Earth to Mars in three minutes and to the Sun in eight and a half. It takes just over four years to get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.
Light travels more slowly through water
than through air. This means that light bends when it passes from air into water, which is why straws appear to be broken.Light Waves
Light travels through the universe as tiny, invisible waves of energy. You can see light only when it hits something, which is why empty space is dark.
Light waves are so short that 14,000 of them would fit across your thumbnail. Light waves are formed by
countless tiny particles called photons, zig-zagging 600 trillion times a second.On a sunny day, in just one second 1,000 billion photons of light strike a pinhead. Photons, or light particles, from the very furthest galaxies are very old indeed. They’ve been whizzing along for over 12 billion years.
Fluorescent Lights
Fluorescent lights stay cool and produce a brilliant white light, but they do flicker slightly. This means that the amount of light they give off isn’t constant, which can give people headaches.
They produce less heat than normal bulbs, so they use less electricity. White light, like sunlight, contains every color there is. When a beam of white light shines through a wedge of glass called a prism, it emerges split into a rainbow of colors called a spectrum.