To convert kilometers to miles, just multiply kilometers by 0.6. (If you, like many students, still prefer miles to kilometers, you might find the following trick helpful. If the Sun were reduced to the size of a basketball, Earth would be a small apple seed about 30 meters from the ball.ģ × 10 7 3 × 10 7 seconds) to go around the Sun at our distance to make it around, we must travel at approximately 110,000 kilometers per hour. The diameter of the Sun is about 1.5 million kilometers Earth could fit comfortably inside one of the minor eruptions that occurs on the surface of our star. Light takes slightly more than 8 minutes to travel 1 astronomical unit, which means the latest news we receive from the Sun is always 8 minutes old. We call the average Earth–Sun distance an astronomical unit (AU) because, in the early days of astronomy, it was the most important measuring standard. This was not because the astronauts were thinking slowly, but rather because it took the radio waves almost 3 seconds to make the round trip.Įarth revolves around our star, the Sun, which is about 150 million kilometers away-approximately 400 times as far away from us as the Moon. If you’ve seen videos of the Apollo flights to the Moon, you may recall that there was a delay of about 3 seconds between the time Mission Control asked a question and the time the astronauts responded. Light (or radio waves) takes 1.3 seconds to travel between Earth and the Moon. This image shows Earth and the Moon shown to scale for both size and distance. Figure 1.7 Earth and Moon, Drawn to Scale.
0 kommentar(er)
