How long does it take for sunlight to reach the moon?

Answer 1

Answer:Earth ranges from 91 million miles to 94.5 million miles from the sun.

The moon is 238,855.086 miles from Earth.

The speed of light is 670,616,629 mph.

Therefore:The minimum distance from the sun to the moon is 91,238,855.1 miles.

The maximum distance from the sun to the moon is 94,738,855.1 miles.

Therefore:The amount of time it takes for light to travel from the sun to the moon can be

anywhere from 6.11862934 × 1016 hours to 6.35334516 × 1016 hours.

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I have a couple of comments. Everybody else has already had a dip

in this pool, so I guess I can jump in too without getting hurt:

-- The first answer is a beautiful example of what happens when you put all of

your trust in your calculator or your computer. A truly amazing job of gathering

all the right numbers, and working through them for an answer, but he still made

a humongous mistake ... multiplying instead of dividing ... and he never caught it.

Why do you think that happened ? My answer is: No matter how complicated and

technical the problem and the process of solving it may be, the answer has to

satisfy your brain before you send it out there. That means you must stand back,

look at your answer, and ask "Does this answer make sense ?" Regardless of what

the calculator may say, your gut has to buy it. If your gut has no clue, then you're

at the mercy of your machines. That's a dangerous place to be, as you can plainly

see by looking back at the first answer.

-- The moon revolves around the Earth. So it's closer to the sun than we are for

half the time, and farther from the sun than we are for the other half of the time.

When you average that out, the moon is, on the average, exactly the same

distance from the sun as the Earth is, so it takes sunlight exactly the same length

of time to reach the Moon, on the average, that it takes to reach the Earth.

That's 8minutes and 20seconds . On the average.

-- The first contributor got wound up in his numbers, all with good intentions, and

ended up with kind of a mish-MASH. When it came to doing his final calculations,

he used severely rounded figures for the Earth's aphelion and perihelion radii,

(nearest and farthest distances from the sun), but then took the average value of

a number that gyrates wildly ... the moon's distance from Earth ... and wrote that

one to a precision of nine ( ! ) significant figures. His figure for the speed of light

in mph is right on.

-- I shall now commit a maneuver that will mark me as one of the lowest forms of

life in the Q&A world: I'll take the numbers that the first contributor collected with

so much toil, sweat, and tears, fix his little computational error, and present the

result as my own work.

Here I go:

Answer:Earth ranges from 91 million miles to 94.5 million miles from the sun.

The moon is 238,855.086 miles from Earth.

The speed of light is 670,616,629 mph.

Therefore:The minimum distance from the sun to the moon is 91,238,855.1 miles.

The maximum distance from the sun to the moon is 94,738,855.1 miles.

Therefore:The amount of time it takes for light to travel from the sun to the moon can be

anywhere from 489.8 seconds to 508.6 seconds.

Answer 2

Minimum time: 7min 29 seconds

Maximum time: 8minutes 28 seconds

Explanation:

The speed of light is 0,3 million km/s

The distance between the earth and the sun varies between 147,1 and 152,1 million km, while the distance earth-moon is (0,35 to 0,4 million km).

Consequently, the distance moon-sun varies from 146,75 and 152,5 million km

Therefore sunlight takes from 146,75/0,3 to 152,5/0,3 seconds to reach the moon. That is from 449 to 508 seconds.

Answer 3

Roughly 2.5 seconds. Let's do the math:

The average distance between the moon's surface and the earth's surface is 380,500 kilometers(km). Light is an electromagnetic wave and travels at a speed roughly 3 x 10^8 meters/second(m/s) in a vacuum. Since distance = speed*time the time it takes for the laser pulse to travel from the the earth to the moon is, time = distance/speed. For round trip time = 2*(distance/speed). So the calculation is: time=2*(38500 x 10^3 m / 3 x 10^8 m/s) = 2.56 s.

Answer 4

The speed of light in a vacuum (we can pretend the Solar System is a vacuum; it's not really, but it's close enough it's not going to introduce significant error at the level of precision we're going to be using) is about 300,000 km per second.

The Moon is, on average, about 150,000,000 km from the Sun (same as the Earth). If you do the math, that's 500 seconds. The Moon's orbit means it could be around 200,000 km closer or further away than that, but you can see that makes a difference of less than a second either way; the Earth/Moon system's orbit about the Sun introduces a slightly larger variation, but even that is under 10 seconds either way.

Answer 5

Just like any other trip, that's going to depend on where it starts out from.

-- From the sun, 81/3 minutes.

-- From the Earth, 1.27 seconds.

Answer 6

Same as to reach the Earth, since it orbits the Earth. The distance (150 million km) divided by the speed of light (300,000 km/sec) result in approximately 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

Answer 7

At an average distance of 240,000 miles from Earth, light travelling at 186,000 miles per second would take roughly 1.29 seconds to make the trip.

Answer 8

8 minutes