SEVERAL scientists have calculated how fast they think Santa Claus has to travel to give out all his Christmas presents in one night.
The speed varies depending on how many households and children are included in the equation but the general conclusion is one of lightning-fast speed.
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Students at The University of Leicester once calculated how fast Santa would need to be.
Their equation used the figure 715 million for the number of Christian children around the world in 2018.
They worked out that equates to 238 million households if there’s an average of three children per household.
The students assumed Santa would need a travel time of 12 hours.
They also took into account different time zones, which means he’d actually have an extra 24 hours to complete his mammoth task.
Based on this information, Santa needs to move 0.5% of the speed of light to get all gifts to all those people.
University of Leicester physics students, Arcchana Gajendran, Shannon Madden, and Ridda Mahmood worked on this research.
Madden in a 2018 press release: “We came up with a seasonal question we thought would be fun and festive to investigate, although we know there are some limitations.”
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Limitations include the issue of not knowing how long Santa spends in each household.
Even though Christmas is a religious holiday, lots of people who aren’t Christian still celebrate with gifts.
The study is also now five years old and the world’s population has grown from 7.6 billion in 2018 to over eight billion in 2023.
That means there are a lot more children to take into consideration.
Arnold Pompos of Purdue University also tried to calculate the speed of Santa but used 800 million children in 200 million homes as his statistics.
He estimated Santa would need 10 hours and need to travel at 4,705,882 kilometers per hour.
