The heat… we feel it every day! Sometimes, when it’s hot, it feels like the sun is just an inch away from the top of the head. Of course, in reality, the sun is very far away. How Far is the Earth and the Sun?
But really, how far is the sun from where we are?
The short answer: 150 million kilometers! But in fact, our brains are not used to imagining such great distances. So, for simplicity’s sake, just try to imagine if the sun was shrunk super tiny to the size of a basketball! On a proportional scale, it makes the earth the size of a peppercorn. If that’s the case, the sun and the earth will be the distance of a basketball court from end to end. By the way, if it’s on the same scale, the distance of the next nearest star will make us cross the ocean. Because it’s the same distance as New York to the capital city of Madagascar. How far away!
How Magnificent!
Okay, if we use the analogy earlier, I think we know how big the sun is and how strong its energy is so that it can reach the earth. Yes, the only star in our solar system is indeed the brightest object for us. Just imagine, the mass of the sun can be up to hundreds of thousands larger than the earth. It even reach 99.8% of the total weight of all objects in our solar system.
In a way, the earth is in the right position. We are not too far to freeze, and not too close to be burned by the hot sun. We are at the right distance to receive the nuclear fusion reaction in the sun’s core, which releases billions of times more energy every second than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever created by humans. The sun gives energy and makes life possible right here on the little blue dot we call earth.
Now, every time we go outside, we can begin to understand that the warm light we always feel, the heat that makes us sweat, to the point where it dries the laundry, is coming from far away.
