Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by InvaderFizz 558 days ago
When put in that context, it seems rather slow.
3 comments

At solar system scale (and bigger), even light is slow.
Earth orbits at 2pi AU/year by definition, so it's 29x faster than that. In fact it's not even possible for an object bound within the solar system to move that fast, as the radius of an orbit at that speed would (per the back of my envelope) be well inside the sun itself.
Even at our solar system's scale it can seem slow. Pluto gets to about 50AU from the sun, but the Oort cloud is between 2,000 and 5,000 AU from the sun. 24 1/2 days until something reaches earth vs almost seven years.