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How long does it take sunlight to reach the Earth?

Hither'south a question… how long does information technology have sunlight to reach Earth? This sounds similar a strange question, simply remember about it. Sunlight travels at the speed of light. Photons emitted from the surface of the Sun demand to travel across the vacuum of infinite to reach our optics.

The short reply is that it takes sunlight an average of 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the Lord's day to the Earth.

If the Sun suddenly disappeared from the Universe (non that this could really happen, don't panic), it would accept a little more than 8 minutes before you lot realized it was time to put on a sweater.

Here'southward the math. We orbit the Sun at a altitude of most 150 million km. Lite moves at 300,000 kilometers/second. Split these and you get 500 seconds, or 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

This is an average number. Remember, the Earth follows an elliptical orbit effectually the Sun, ranging from 147 million to 152 million km. At its closest signal, sunlight only takes 490 seconds to reach Earth. And then at the about distant bespeak, it takes 507 seconds for sunlight to make the journeying.

But the story of light gets fifty-fifty more interesting, when you think about the journey lite needs to make within the Dominicus.

You probably know that photons are created by fusion reactions inside the Sun's core. They commencement off as gamma radiation and then are emitted and absorbed countless times in the Sun's radiative zone, wandering effectually inside the massive star earlier they finally accomplish 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 dominicus.

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

As y'all look outward into space, yous're really looking backwards in time.

The light yous meet from your computer is nanoseconds old. The light reflected from the surface of the Moon takes merely a second to reach Earth. The Sun is more than viii calorie-free-minutes away. And so, if the low-cal from the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) takes more than 4 years to reach usa, we're seeing that star four years in the past.

At that place are galaxies millions of light-years away, which means the light we're seeing left the surface of those stars millions of years ago. For example, the milky way M109 is located almost 83.5 million low-cal-years abroad.

If aliens lived in those galaxies, and had strong enough telescopes, they would see the Earth equally information technology looked in the by. They might fifty-fifty see dinosaurs walking on the surface.



Citation: How long does it take sunlight to reach the World? (2013, April 15) retrieved 31 January 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2013-04-sunlight-earth.html

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How Long Does It Take to Draw Blood TUTORIAL

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