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Distances between objects in the solar system and universe are extremely
large. If you could race among the stars at the speed of light, how
long would it take you to travel to your destination?
Light travels at 186,212 miles per second. However, even at that high speed, the journey through space to most destinations takes a significant amount of time. Consider the light from the sun and the distance it has to travel to the planets. When light from the Sun hits the Earth, it has taken over 8 minutes to reach us. That means events observed on the sun are actually 8 minutes old. Due to the immense distances in space, we can never really observe astronomical events in "real time". We are always observing events that happened in the past.
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| Average time for Sunlight to reach the Planets | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury | Venus | Earth | Mars | Jupiter | Saturn | Uranus | Neptune | Pluto |
| 3.2 Minutes | 6 Minutes | 8.3 Minutes | 12.5 Minutes | 43 Minutes | 1.3 Hours | 2.6 Hours | 4.1 Hours | 5.4 Hours |
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