Transcript; Astronomy spans an enormous range in scales of time as well. The shortest thing we can measure, 10-23 seconds, is the time it takes light to cross a proton. Visible waves of light have a frequency of about 1015 Hertz, which means that one oscillation of light as an electromagnetic wave is 10-15 seconds. In the middle of this huge range are humans; a heartbeat, roughly 1 second. 107 seconds is a year. 1011 seconds is the length of recorded history, and the age of the universe measured since the big bang is 1018 seconds. The full range of these numbers from largest to smallest is 41 orders of magnitude or powers of 10.