• Question: how far away is the sun

    Asked by ledw to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 18 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      The Sun is 93 million miles from Earth – handily called One Astronomical Unit (1 AU) by space scientists.

      This distance does vary a bit over they year as we orbit the Sun – our orbit is more of a squashed circle (ellipse) than a perfectly round circle, so sometimes we’re closer than at other times… In fact we’re closest in January!

    • Photo: Steven Gardner

      Steven Gardner answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      I’d just like to add that’s about 8 light minutes.

    • Photo: Jess Bean

      Jess Bean answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      Those 93 million miles are just right as well! A few million closer and we’d burn, a few million further away and we’d be chilling in freezing cold temperatures.
      Also, if the sun didn’t move a little bit over the year, we wouldn’t have seasons 🙂

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