• Question: How long does light take to travel from the Sun to the Earth?

    Asked by balletshoes1998 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      8 minutes (the sun is 8 light minutes away).

      What’s more interesting is that the light that gets made in the middle of the sun can take millions of years to get from the middle to the edge before it travels those 8 minutes!

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 17 Mar 2012:

      8 minutes like Adam said.

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      It takes about 8 minutes. Which means that if we send any space probes near the sun, it takes 8 minutes for them to send information to us and another 8 minutes for us to send them any commands.

      That means more and more future probes will be able to make decisions on what to measure and when by themselves without us telling them exactly what to do because it might take us too long.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      8 minutes and 19 seconds, so you are always looking at the sun over 8 minutes in the past. Time travel!

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