How many years would it take to get to the sun?

By oliviajones January 9, 2023 Physics 0 Comments

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How many years would it take to get to the sun?

On an average jet plane, flying at 550 miles per hour, it would take 19.29 years, or 7,045 days to travel the 93 million miles to the Sun. At this speed, how many days would it take to travel to the sun from Earth, located at a distance of 149 million kilometers? Answer: Time = Distance/speed so Time = 149,000,000 km/ 28,000 = 5321 hours or 222 days. The sun and the solar system appear to be moving at 200 kilometers per second, or at an average speed of 448,000 mph (720,000 km/h). Even at this rapid speed, the solar system would take about 230 million years to travel all the way around the Milky Way. The Milky Way, too, moves in space relative to other galaxies. In about 5 billion years, the hydrogen in the Sun’s core will run out and the sun will not have enough fuel for nuclear fusion. So, in about 5 billion years, the Sun will stop shining. Our sun’s death is a long way off — about 4.5 billion years, give or take — but someday it’s going to happen, and what then for our solar system?

How far exactly is the sun from the Earth?

As noted earlier, Earth’s average distance to the Sun is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the Sun. That’s 1 AU. Our Sun is 4,500,000,000 years old. That’s a lot of zeroes. That’s four and a half billion. Eventually, scientists calculated that the Sun contains almost 2.5 trillion tons of gold, enough to fill Earth’s oceans and more. Still, that’s just eight atoms of gold for every trillion atoms of hydrogen — a tiny amount when compared to the mass of the Sun. But how did gold come to be in the Sun and Earth? There are likely to be many more planetary systems out there waiting to be discovered! Our Sun is just one of about 200 billion stars in our galaxy. In our solar system, the closest planets to the sun, Mercury and Venus, are expected to get swallowed by the growing sun entirely. Earth, while it may survive, will be so scorched that it will become completely uninhabitable.

Can Earth survive without the sun?

If the sun would go out, no life could survive on most of earth’s surface within a few weeks. Water and air would freeze over into sheets of ice. The current mean temperature of the Earth’s surface is about 300 Kelvin (K). This means in two months the temperature would drop to 150K, and 75K in four months. To compare, the freezing point of water is 273K. So basically it’d get too cold for us humans within just a few weeks. At the current rate of solar brightening—just over 1% every 100 million years—Earth would suffer this runaway greenhouse in 600 million to 700 million years. Earth will suffer some preliminary effects leading up to that, too. The gravitational pull of the moon moderates Earth’s wobble, keeping the climate stable. That’s a boon for life. Without it, we could have enormous climate mood swings over billions of years, with different areas getting extraordinarily hot and then plunging into long ice ages. The amount of water in the atmosphere of Venus is so low that even the most drought-tolerant of Earth’s microbes wouldn’t be able to survive there, a new study has found.