How Long Would It Take To Walk Around The Sun

Hither's a question… how long does information technology take sunlight to attain World? This sounds similar a strange question, only think about information technology. Sunlight travels at the speed of light. Photons emitted from the surface of the Sunday demand to travel across the vacuum of space to reach our eyes.

The short answer is that it takes sunlight an average of 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the Sun to the World.

If the Sun all of a sudden disappeared from the Universe (not that this could actually happen, don't panic), information technology would take a trivial more than than eight minutes before you realized information technology was time to put on a sweater.

Here's the math. We orbit the Sun at a distance of near 150 meg km. Light moves at 300,000 kilometers/second. Divide these and you lot get 500 seconds, or viii minutes and 20 seconds.

This is an average number. Remember, the World follows an elliptical orbit around the Sun, ranging from 147 million to 152 1000000 km. At its closest bespeak, sunlight but takes 490 seconds to reach Earth. Then at the nigh distant signal, it takes 507 seconds for sunlight to make the journeying.

But the story of lite gets fifty-fifty more interesting, when you think about the journeying low-cal needs to make within the Lord's day.

You probably know that photons are created by fusion reactions inside the Sunday'due south cadre. They commencement off equally gamma radiations and then are emitted and captivated countless times in the Sun's radiative zone, wandering effectually inside the massive star before they finally attain the surface.

What you probably don't know, is that these photons striking your eyeballs were ACTUALLY created tens of thousands of years ago and information technology took that long for them to be emitted by the sunday.

Once they escaped the surface, it was only a short 8 minutes for those photons to cross the vast distance from the Sunday to the Earth

Equally you wait outward into space, you lot're actually looking backwards in time.

The low-cal you come across from your computer is nanoseconds old. The light reflected from the surface of the Moon takes merely a 2d to achieve Earth. The Sun is more than viii calorie-free-minutes away. And and then, if the lite from the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) takes more than 4 years to attain us, we're seeing that star 4 years in the past.

At that place are galaxies millions of light-years away, which means the light nosotros're seeing left the surface of those stars millions of years agone. For example, the galaxy M109 is located about 83.5 1000000 light-years abroad.

If aliens lived in those galaxies, and had potent enough telescopes, they would meet the Earth equally it looked in the past. They might even see dinosaurs walking on the surface.

Commendation: How long does information technology take sunlight to reach the World? (2013, April xv) retrieved 8 January 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2013-04-sunlight-earth.html

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Source: https://phys.org/news/2013-04-sunlight-earth.html

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