The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted as 'c', is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its exact value is 299,792,458 metres per second (approximately 3.00×108 m/s, or 300,000 km/s (186,000 mi/s)). It is exact because the unit of length, the metre, is defined from this constant and the international standard for time.

According to special relativity, c is the maximum speed at which all conventional matter and hence all known forms of information in the universe can travel. Though this speed is most commonly associated with light, it is in fact the speed at which all massless particles and changes of the associated fields travel in vacuum (including electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves). Such particles and waves travel at c regardless of the motion of the source or the inertial reference frame of the observer. In the theory of relativity, c interrelates space and time, and also appears in the famous equation of mass–energy equivalence E = mc2.

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