Most languages used around the world are written from left to right. Some are written top to bottom, but how many languages are written from right to left?
Right, Not Backwards
Light Speed
The speed of light in vacuum, is a universal physical constant that is important in physics. Its exact value is defined as 299,792,458 meters (983,571,056 feet) per second. That translates to just about 186,282 miles per second.
A light-year – the distance light travels in one year – is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). To put that in perspective, light from the sun (about 93,000,000 miles away from us) takes about 8 minutes to reach our eyes, so the sun has set about 8 minutes before you actually see the sunset!
Light from Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own, takes about 4.37 years to get here – that’s over 43 trillion kilometers away, if you’re doing the math (or just over 26.7 trillion miles).
In today’s terms, if we launched the most powerful rocket currently known to humans here on planet Earth, it would take about 80,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
What is the speed of light in a vacuum?
Baghdad
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are located approximately 50 km south of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are located approximately 50 km south of the capital of what country?
It’s a Gas
Although extraordinary for us here on planet Earth, our sun is an ordinary star composed mainly of Hydrogen and Helium. Scientists tell us it is only one of the approximately 100 billion stars that exist in the Milky Way, our galaxy.
Scientists believe the sun began to take shape over 4 billion years ago from a molecular cloud. Without boring you with all the scientific theory, eventually the gases became hot enough for nuclear fusion, becoming what we know as our sun today – the center of our solar system.
Our sun is about 93 million miles away from us here on Earth and even traveling at light speed, it still takes the light emitted from the sun just over eight minutes to reach us here on Earth. Put another way, while you are watching that beautiful sunset, bear in mind that the sun actually ‘set’ more than eight minutes before you see those last rays dip below the horizon!
Our Sun
What two major elements make up our sun?
Almost 2 Years!
On average, an elephant pregnancy lasts 22 months!
Elephants
How long do elephant pregnancies last?
Gioacchino Rossini
The William Tell Overture, overture to the opera William Tell, was composed by Gioachino Rossini. The opera premiered in 1829 and was the last of Rossini’s 39 operas.