Light travels at about 300 million meters per second. That's fast - nothing in the universe can go faster. In one second, light could circle Earth about seven times.

But here's what's wild: light is an electromagnetic wave. It doesn't need a medium to travel through. That's why sunlight can come through the vacuum of space. Sound needs air, light doesn't.

Particle Nature of Light

Here's where it gets weird. Sometimes light acts like a wave, sometimes like particles called photons. This is wave-particle duality, and it's one of the fundamental strangenesses of quantum mechanics.

Einstein won his Nobel prize for explaining the photoelectric effect - showing light acts as particles. That's also how solar panels work.