Question

How many light minutes is the earth away from the sun?

Answer 1

Hint: Firstly, you could recall what exactly a light minute is. Then you could recall the value of distance between Earth and sun in light minutes. You could prove the same value by dividing the known distance in kilometers by the speed of light. Also, mention why the value found is considered an average value.

Complete answer:
In the question, we are asked to find the distance of the earth from the sun in light minutes. Before answering the question, let us understand what a light minute is. Light minute can be defined as the distance covered by light in a minute. It is found that the sun is eight light minutes away from the Earth which directly implies that it takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach the surface of earth.

You should keep in mind that the light from the sun travels across the sun’s radiative zone and also after being scattered by the gases in Earth’s atmosphere.

We could prove this value quantitatively from the known distance of earth from in kilometers. As the orbit of Earth is elliptical, the distance between sun and earth varies from 147million to 152 million kilometers. Considering their average 150million km and then dividing this value by velocity of light in vacuum will give us the value to be approximately 8 minutes.

So we could conclude that the earth is eight light minutes away from the sun.

Note:
One shouldn’t assume that the photons that strike our eyeballs were created 8 light minutes ago. It was actually created tens of thousands of years ago. In order to understand this time lag, you could recall that these photons are created as the result of fusion reactions in the sun's core and these gamma radiation are emitted as well as absorbed innumerable times within the sun’s radiative zone.