What percentage of light is reflected by earth?

Answer 1

The energy of the light received by the Earth from the sun is called insolation. The average solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth's atmosphere is roughly 1,366 watts per square meter By the time this energy has reached Earth's surface it is reduced to about 1,000 watts per square meter.

Answer 2

About 5x10-27 percent. How is this so? Given: the radius of your eye is 0.75 mm (in bright light) the distance of your eye to the sun is one AU, this is 149,597,870,697 meter The surface of your eye's pupil is 1.767x10-6 m2 Your eye is on a sphere with radius 1 AU; the surface of this sphere is 7.03x1022 m2 Let's assume that the sun's light is evenly distributed over this sphere. The ratio of the surfaces of your eye's pupil and the sphere's is 2.5x10-29 However, if you have two eyes, this ratio doubles. Therefore: 5x10-29, this is 5x10-27 percent.

Answer 3

Not much; one or two percent at most. Look at the Moon tonight, for example. Today is the "First Quarter" Moon, so one half of the Moon's visible surface is illuminated by the Sun.

But if you look carefully, you can see the "dark" half of the Moon. If it were truly dark, you would see nothing; the dim view that you have of the dark part of the Moon, you see by reflected Earthlight.

See the difference? The "dark" part is illuminated by reflected Earthlight only. The bright part is direct sunlight PLUS reflected Earthlight.

Answer 4

5%, the rest is dark mass

I think the person who answered before is referring to dark matter, which makes up about 80% of the universe. As far as the visible stuff goes, we can only see the part of the universe that light has traveled too. The length that light travels per year is referred to as a "light-year", and that is about 300,000 km. We can see as far as about 13.5 billion light years, however there is much beyond what we CAN see. It is thought that during the Plank era, space expanded faster than the speed of light.

Answer 5

The "albedo" of the Moon, a measure of its reflectivity, is about 0.04; approximately the same as a charcoal briquette. In other words, the Moon reflects about 4% of the sunlight that hits it.

Answer 6

Yes is does, just like the moon does, but only a small amount, so its not as clear as the moon.

The above answer is not correct because actually the Earth reflects much more light than the moon. Albedo is the astronomical measure that indicates how good of a reflector an astronomical object is: the moon albedo is 0.12, the Earth albedo is 0.36. This makes the Earth a pretty good mirror in comparison with the moon.

Answer 7

R = radius of Earths orbit

r = radius of Earth

Area of sphere is 4(Pi)r2

half of the earth is in darkness so area of earth exposed to sun is .5 x 4(Pi)r2

Area or sphere at R 4(Pi)R2

So (.5x4(Pi)r2 / 4(Pi)R2 ) x 100 = 50(r/R)2 %

Answer 8

At any moment, almost* exactly half (to precisely answer, 50%) of earth is lit by the sun and the other half is not.

There's no place on earth that's always light, and no place on earth that's always dark.

* Because the sun is larger than the earth, akin to a huge floodlight shining on a tiny marble, slightly more than half is lit at any one time. However, the size difference (which seems immense) is minute compared with the distance between the earth and sun, so this amount over is not significant (certainly sufficiently below 1% to round down to 0% using whole-number precision). Further, the earth's atmosphere refracts light, which is why we can see a pre-dawn and post-dusk glow; also, moonlight which we can sometimes see at night (depending on clouds and lunar phase) is actually sunlight reflecting off the moon.

Answer 9

About 50% (excluding land that is shaded by another land mass, lit by reflection, or, conversely, covered by clouds). Parallel rays of light falling on a smooth sphere will illuminate one half of the sphere.

It is actually a little more than 50% illuminated at any given moment.

While the Sun is about 93 million miles away, its diameter is roughly 850 thousand miles. (The Sun's diameter is a little under 1% of its distance from us.) So its rays are not precisely parallel. There is a small angular effect from this huge diameter, and a little more than 50% of the Earth's surface would be directly exposed to the Sun. There is also the bending of light by our atmosphere, causing us to "see" the Sun above the horizon when it is technically already below. There is also the fact that our atmosphere is very good at scattering light. This is why we have dawn and dusk (twilight).

Answer 10

Mostly, the Moon reflects the light from the Sun.

However, it also reflects the sunlight that is reflected from the Earth, and we can see the "earthshine" whenever we look at the crescent Moon; there is a bright sliver of the Moon that is reflecting the Sun's light directly, and a dark, very dimly lit area of the rest of the Moon which glows very faintly with the sunlight that has first bounced off of the Earth and then back off the Moon again.