Light from the Sun takes about 8.0 min to reach Earth. How far away is the Sun? Approximately how many kilometers is the average distance between the Sun and the Earth? How long does it take light to travel from the Sun to Venus ?
How many light years away can the Hubble Telescope see? What planet is one astronomical unit from the Sun? How many miles does the Earth travel around the Sun in a year? How many light years can the Hubble Space Telescope see? What is the size of the sun's diameter in kilometers?
An astronomical unit (AU) is exactly 149,597,870,700 meters (92,955,807 miles or 149,597,871 kilometers), according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU). This is roughly the average distance between Earth and the sun. Astronomers use astronomical units to describe how far away obje...
Mercury is usually between 29 and 43 million miles (46 and 70 million kilometers) away from the sun. The Parker Solar Probe will go far inside the planet's orbit to gather information on solar wind. This phenomenon still is poorly understood but can destroy satellites and really screw up ...
"It's harder than you think just to put a ruler on these images and figure out how big the sun is — [SDO] doesn't have enough precision to nail this down," NASA researcher Ernie Wrighttold Space.com. "Similarly, with theMercuryandVenustransits, it turns out [a measurement based on...
This is approximately 17,000 mph (27,359 kph) at an altitude of 150 miles (242 kilometers). Without gravity, the satellite's inertia would carry it off into space. Even with gravity, if the intended satellite goes too fast, it will eventually fly away. On the other hand, if the ...
A comet that is far from the sun is virtually indistinguishable from an asteroid. When its orbit brings it close to the sun, though, the heat vaporizes the ice, and the vapor expands to form a cloud around the nucleus. The nucleus may be only a few kilometers across, but the cloud ca...
Think of it this way: you can easily see a hill that looms 10-15 kilometers away from your house, but can you see a grain of sugar lying just a few meters away from your eyes? Probably not. In much the same way, a distant galaxy is visible to us with the naked ey...
As the Moon rotates in its elliptical orbit around Earth, there are two points that astronomers marked with names. “Lunar Perigee,” which is the the point of the closest distance of the Moon to our planet at 363,104 kilometers, and “Lunar Apogee”, which is the point of the farthest...
Is there more than one kind of space?Mostly we're interested in the interplanetary space of our own Solar System (the area round the Sun), which is measured in distances of millions of kilometers. But space telescopes and unmanned probes also study the further reaches of what's called ...