🤔 Today's Trivia Question:

How Many Minutes Does It Take the Light from the Sun to Reach Earth?

Correct Answer: B) 8 Minutes & 20 Seconds

The Speed of Light: Why We See the Sun as It Was 8 Minutes Ago

Sunlight, traveling at the speed of light, takes approximately 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth, covering the 93-million-mile (150-million-kilometer) distance between the two. This delay occurs because, despite being incredibly fast—about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second)—the speed of light is finite. We see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago, meaning any sudden change, such as its disappearance, would not be noticeable on Earth until those 8 minutes had passed.

The time it takes for sunlight to reach other planets varies according to their distance from the sun. For instance, it takes just over 3 minutes to reach Mercury, around 6 minutes for Venus, and 12.6 minutes for Mars. For the gas giants, the wait is considerably longer: 43 minutes for Jupiter, nearly 80 minutes for Saturn, 160 minutes for Uranus, and a little over 4 hours for Neptune.