Each location on Earth experiences an average of 12 hours of daylight per day, but the actual number of daylight hours on any given day of the year varies from place to place.
How many hours of light does Earth get?
how far away is jupiter from earth in light minutes?
This means that the planets have a center of mass not only with the sun but also with each other; however, the massive sun dominates the center-of-mass point between, for example, Earth and Mercury. At times when Jupiter is behind the sun (where Jupiter, the sun and the Earth align), it moves as far away as 601 million miles. This probe will study Jupiter’s moon, Europa, and look especially for signs of life that may be present in its water. In part, this has to do with its size and composition, but the planet gets brighter and dimmer as its distance from Earth increases.
This retrograde motion caused several problems for the original Sun-centered (or Copernican) models of the solar system, whose perfect circles did not account for the apparent loop made by Jupiter and other planets. At its closest point, or perihelion, Jupiter is 460 million miles (741 million km) from the star; at its farthest point, or aphelion, it is 508 million miles (817 million km) away. Instead, let’s understand Jupiter’s closest, farthest, and average distance from Earth. The farther away an object is in space, the longer it takes for its light to reach us, and the older that light is when it reaches Earth.
It still holds the record for being the fastest object ejected from Earth, and it used a gravitational assist from Jupiter to gain even more speed. Getting to Jupiter is definitely possible; we’ve tried it nine times so far, but sending a crew there would be more trouble. The universe tells its story mainly through light and other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. The distance from Jupiter to Earth is currently 647,009,434 kilometers, equivalent to 4.324991 Astronomical Units.
When the two planets are at their closest point, the distance to Jupiter is only 365 million miles (588 million kilometers). Because both planets travel in an elliptical path around the sun, Jupiter’s distance from Earth changes constantly. Although it certainly makes a difference, Jupiter is so bright and large that you should have no problem seeing it even if it is at its greatest possible distance. The distance value given may be somewhat inaccurate around the times of closest approach for objects that pass extremely close to Earth.
how far away is saturn from earth in light minutes?
At its farthest point (aphelion), Saturn is 934 million miles (1.5 billion km) from the sun; at its closest point (perihelion), Saturn’s distance from the sun is only 839 million miles (1.4 billion km). Saturn occupies nearly 60 percent of Jupiter’s volume, but has only one-third of its mass and the lowest average density, about 70 percent that of water, of any known object in the solar system. Although a day on Saturn is shorter than on Earth, the distance at which the gas giant orbits the Sun is enormous. Super-fast winds blow in the upper regions of the atmosphere, reaching up to 1,100 miles per hour (1,800 kilometers per hour) around the equator.
Although no liquid water is found on Saturn (it has no surface), there are traces of moisture in the upper atmosphere, possibly deposited there by rainfall from its icy moon, Enceladus. During the middle of Saturn’s orbit around the Sun, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun at an angle of 26.73° and receives more sunlight compared to the southern hemisphere. Although Saturn rotates slightly slower than Jupiter, it is more oblate because its rotational acceleration cancels out a larger fraction of the planet’s gravity at the equator. For example, Atlas and Pan look like flying saucers, Enceladus probably has a water ocean beneath its crust that ejects water and other elements to the surface, and Iapetus has two very contrasting hemispheres (one is bright, the other is dark).
The first three missions were short-lived flybys, but Cassini orbited Saturn for years of research, while its Huygens probe parachuted through Titan’s atmosphere and landed on its surface, becoming the first spacecraft to land on a moon other than Earth’s. The first three missions were short-lived flybys, but Cassini orbited Saturn for years of research, while its Huygens probe parachuted through Titan’s atmosphere and landed on its surface, becoming the first spacecraft to land on a moon other than Earth. They were discovered by Galileo in the 17th century, but his telescope was not powerful enough to see them as such. There are at least 53 confirmed moons orbiting Saturn (there are another 9 yet to be confirmed). Saturn is an average of 886 million miles (1.4 billion km) from the Sun, nine and a half times the average distance from Earth.
Its closest distance to Earth is about 1.2 billion km (746 million miles), and its phase angle, the angle it forms with the Sun and Earth, never exceeds 6°. The distance between Saturn and the Sun ranges from 839 million miles (1.4 billion km) to 934 million miles (1.5 billion km). In contrast, the diameter measured from the North Pole to the South Pole is 68,000 miles (109,000 kilometers). Although Voyager 2 was launched a month earlier than its twin, it took a longer, more circular route and arrived in August 1981, taking four years to reach Saturn.
Another result is that Saturn’s rings, which lie in the plane of its equator, appear to observers on Earth at opening angles ranging from 0° (edge-on) to almost 30°. Instead of having to understand what it means for a planet to be billions and billions of kilometers away, thinking in light-years can help visualize the time it takes light to travel from one point to another. Saturn has the lowest average density – about 70 times that of water – of all the known objects in the solar system. As the distance keeps changing, Saturn’s closest approach to Earth occurs when both planets are on the same side of the Sun.
By comparison, its polar diameter is only 67,560 miles (108,728 km), or 10 percent smaller, making Saturn the most oblate (flattened at the poles) of all the planets in the solar system.
how many light minutes away is the earth from the sun?
Although they travel at the fastest possible speed (the speed of light), they take a long time to get there. Remember that the Earth follows an elliptical orbit around the Sun, which ranges from 147 million to 152 million kilometers. This is because it took 1.3 seconds for the question to travel to the Moon, and another 1.3 seconds for the answer to return to Earth. You see, according to Einstein, the closer you travel to the speed of light, the more the time dilates ( i.
And so, if the light from the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) takes more than 4 years to reach us, we are looking at that star 4 years in the past. We learn about planets, stars and galaxies by their visible light, and also by the shorter wavelength ultraviolet light and longer wavelength infrared light, invisible to the eye but detectable by certain telescopes on Earth and in space and by the even longer waves of radio energy sent to us. But these are not visible light photons, not the kind of light our eyes can see, but high-energy gamma-ray photons. When astronauts orbited the Moon and later walked on its surface in the 1960s, viewers found that they were slow to respond to questions transmitted from Earth.
This is because stars are so far away from us and it takes a long time for starlight to reach Earth. There are galaxies millions of light years away, which means that the light we see came from the surface of those stars millions of years ago. If aliens lived in those galaxies and had powerful enough telescopes, they would see the Earth as it was in the past.
