SortStack #599 — 2028-01-29
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- Usain Bolt's 100 m world record run 9.6 sec
Bolt ran 9.58 in Berlin 2009, hitting a top speed of 44.7 km/h — faster than the speed limit on many city streets.
- Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' 5.9 min
Radio executives told Freddie Mercury it was far too long to ever get airplay. It topped the UK charts twice, 16 years apart.
- Sunlight travelling from the Sun's surface to Earth 8.3 min
If the Sun vanished right now, we'd keep seeing it — and orbiting it — for another 8 minutes and 20 seconds before noticing anything.
- Rio de Janeiro's Carnival, official festival period 5 days
Around two million people hit the streets per day, and the samba school parade is a fierce contest judged on dozens of criteria.
- The Apollo 11 mission, launch to splashdown 8.1 days
Of the whole voyage, Armstrong and Aldrin spent barely 22 hours on the lunar surface — and only about two and a half walking on it.
- The time since the last woolly mammoths died out 4K years
A dwarf population survived on Wrangel Island until about 2000 BC — meaning mammoths were alive while the Giza pyramids were already centuries old.